28 Nov
2018
28 Nov
'18
6:17 p.m.
Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn
and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder
how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their
way to Bell Labs?
When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the
time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of
the center of the Unix universe in my mind). So 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? If you were a geek was that
the place to go? I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of
how well known the Labs were back then.
So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems -
people end up there?
--lm
29 Nov
29 Nov
8:20 a.m.
Amateur historian perspective on what supported this, not sure how
recruiting and day to day worked hopefully first parties can teach us.
* Military Industrial Complex promoted projects of grandeur in large
industrials like Bell that are probably beyond comprehension of most
recent generations (Dew line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSSrPCE0smo, SAC-NORAD, SAGE, AUTOVON,
Telstar, etc)
* Subscriber base of general public telecom had immense scale and
reliability requirements that supported both rapid R&D and
engineering/operations progress
* Power of monopoly (see Peter Thiel's Zero to One book)
I think in light of scale and difficulty of all the work going on in
physics, electronics manufacturing/scaling, optics, RF etc the
computing work was relatively small in scope to administrators. Why
would you not create an OS or microprocessor in such an environment?
I have some good books on this to recommend:
* The Idea Factory - most recent and popular
* A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System - 6 volumes
on different topics that show a pretty insane progression over 100
years, not sure any other company had endured that much change
There are some organizations that are vaguely like that today like IBM
Research, SRI, Riken. There used to be more like Xerox PARC.
I do wonder if things like twitter and facebook have in effect dumbed
down the population through increased distraction and reduced
attention span. I believe there are some studies on the later. As
far as market forces, lots of smart people are working at stupid
companies like Facebook and Google these days. So people are less
effectively organized and working on less interesting things with less
attention span.
Regards,
Kevin
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 10:17 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn
and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder
how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their
way to Bell Labs?
When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the
time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of
the center of the Unix universe in my mind). So 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? If you were a geek was that
the place to go? I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of
how well known the Labs were back then.
So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems -
people end up there?
--lm
6 Dec
6 Dec
1:37 a.m.
I heard about Bell Labs from someone who had a summer job a couple of
years earlier. He said the people were smart and dedicated, and it
was not a place where everybody went home at 5PM (that was an
understatement!). One of my professors knew someone there and gave
them a call, so an interview was set up. It was about a 2 hour drive
from my home outside of Philadelphia, so I left three hours before the
interview, ran into some traffic, and then got horribly lost (oh for a
GPS!). I got to the interview an hour and 15 minutes late and talked
to an HR person who said, in effect, "It's a shame you came in
today. We hardly hire anyone, and we've already hired everyone we
need for the summer. But since you're here, we've arranged for your
to have lunch with one of our busy researchers..." I had a 2-hour
lunch with Tom Crowley, and we really hit it off. Tom then took me
around and introduced me to people as "This is Steve who will be
working with us this summer...". Then he took me back to HR, where
they effectively repeated their earlier message. It was my first,
but far from my last, experience with organizational incoherence.
But in any case, I got the job. After the first summer, I was
hooked...
It's probably worth pointing out that Xerox PARC soon became a serious
competitor for computing talent, with almost no overlap with the labs
in the computer area--they were a lisp shop and WYSIWYG text
processing and such. I had some very spirited discussions with PARC
folks at conferences that were a lot of fun and very stimulating. In
the compiler area, IBM Yorktown Heights also did work much different
from the Labs, and lead to lively debates at conferences.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry McVoy" <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
To:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Wed, 28 Nov 2018 09:17:25 -0800
Subject:[TUHS] stories
Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn
and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder
how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their
way to Bell Labs?
When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the
time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of
the center of the Unix universe in my mind). So 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? If you were a geek was that
the place to go? I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of
how well known the Labs were back then.
So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems
-
people end up there?
--lm
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Steve Johnson