On 11/29/2018 12:07 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote:

Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time ... I wanted to go there and had
to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that?

Yes, in desirability. But Bell Labs had far more diverse interests. Telephones,
theoretical physics, submarine cables, music, speech, fiber optics, Apollo.
Wahtever you wanted to know or work on, you were likely to find kindred
types and willing management.

This sounds like the environment I went into at Nynex Science and Technology in White Plains, NY during the mid 90's. Labs all over the building, each one doing some groundbreaking (to me) research into cell phone coverage, voice recognition and synthesis, and a bunch of other things.

I did a short consulting stint there as IT support staff, probably not more than 6 months. I generally ruffled the feathers of the older support staff when it came to "fixing" things that were easy to fix. Like the bright (or not, to them) idea of moving everyone from disparate mail servers to one domain, and no longer needing to know which server a certain person's email account was on. {suna,sunb,sunc,etc}. I was getting tired of having to login to the boxes to see where a personal email account was. So I stayed late one night, made it so you could address anyone as "@*.domain" or just "@domain", and it would be routed accordingly, and wind up in the right place. They actually made me put it back the way it was the next day.

So, in terms of research, the place was awesome, I learned and was exposed to a lot of interesting topics. I could spend hours in a lab talking to the people there, brainstorming about all sorts of things.

But in terms of IT support, it was top-down committee-style system administration, and the older/more-senior IT people were not exactly the brightest bulbs. One of the IT managers there loved me, and would talk to me for hours about how to make things better. But his boss would tamp down any ideas of altering things even when the end-users wouldn't notice a difference except there was a newer easier way of doing the same thing.

Oh well, I never really played well with others anyway ;)

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/20/business/business-technology-baby-bells-moving-into-the-lab.html

art k.