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AT&T Labs' Brain Drain
Frisky070802 writes "The Newark Star-Ledger has an article on the brain drain at AT&T Labs, which laid off close to half its researchers two years ago this month, another good fraction last spring, and has lost many of the rest through voluntary departures. The article claims that only Microsoft might have the money to fund basic research as Bell Labs did years ago, though many (including me) would put IBM in the same camp. It cites problems at AT&T, ranging from researchers paying their own way to present at conferences to a loss of free espresso and bottled water. Many luminaries, such as Lorrie Faith Cranor, Avi Rubin, and Bjarne Stroustrup, are quoted --- with Stroustrup saying the lab was "mugged" by Wall Street. (Rumor has it that the losses haven't stemmed, with more top-notch researchers going to academia in the coming months.)" (Non-registration ZIP and age demographic collection.)
They laid off two-thirds of the company. It would be odd if Research wasn't similarly decimated (triated?).
I wonder if the "Open Source" is picking up the slack in basic research these days. I don't think Universitys have been too productive in my lifetime.
- VNC - which is a multiplatform Remote administration tool.
- Text to speach.
- Multimodal data access
- Handwriting recognition.
- Wlan technologies
Probably many more which I cant even remember.There is no god
"We are playing to win," AT&T Labs President Hossein Eslambolchi told industry analysts in February.
Interesting way to go about it!
My Auction: Pan Tilt Ethernet Webcam For Sale
Stroustrup made C++. Stroustrup should be shot.
He's an endowed prof at my alma mater www.tamu.edu. Hope this improves the CS program there.
When travelling, it's ok if the airlines lose your emotional baggage.
The brain drain from Industry to Universities has been going on for some time. For the past few years, the focus of Industry has been on developing marketable technologies, as would justify the investment of venture capitalists. Also with smaller companies working on bringing products to market faster, the pressure on bigger companies to preferentially fund tangible research has been more.
I don't know if research has suffered because of this - most basic research at American universities are funded by defense projects, and they are funded well. I'm not sure if this will produce the kind of innovative stuff that came out of Bell labs, but at least fundamental research is alive!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
While it is a shame to see one of the companies that started this whole mess breaking apart, I am a little on the apathetic side to this.
Don't get me wrong, the loss of jobs anytime is a bad thing. But Bell Labs doesn't really hold some amazing power over the world. It's not like it's needed to help me get by and it surely hasn't given a great deal to me or improved my standard of living lately.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
"He's an endowed prof"
Did you find this out the first time you attended class? Or did he wait to expose himself at one of those off-campus parties?
Labs spokesman Michael Dickman called the downsized AT&T Labs...
Anybody else think that Dickman and downsized are two words that shouldn't be used anywhere near each other?
IBM does a LOT of research, but only a small percentage of it is the type of basic research that leads to BIG jumps in technology. In other words they do process refinement and some materials science research but very little basic science research that leads to the kinds of discoveries that brought about optical lasers, the transistor, etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I blame it on Carrot Top and his annoying 1-800-CALL-ATT commercials. Heartless bastard
MoFscker
Bell Labs was the brain power of AT&T and they went to Lucent when the company spun those business off several years ago. Did I miss AT&T picking them back up or something?
'Same speed C but faster'
...isn't any one company or research centre closing or being made ineffective. Single institutions grow, evolve and die - they have their golden eras and their stagnant eras. When they're no longer useful or vibrant a new research centre crops up. Innovative scientific progress comes in jumps and spurts and doesn't follow a project plan.
.COM bust there's not been any funding for new research centres. There is therefore no chance for a new centre to have its creative spurt, and nowhere for today's creative minds to go.
The real tragedy is rather that with the
I don't think we should be trying to revive dying scientific centres at all, or singling out individual ones. Instead money should be going into research and development in general based on the merits of the research. Fix the general problem and give our best thinkers the chance to do their stuff.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
As the article points out, a lot of people are also moving into the academia, not necessarily back into the industry. Perhaps they're happier working in academic environments - atleast that way, they get to have their knowledge and findings out in the open.
However, what the article fails to mention is that a lot of corporate researchers like this guy are increasingly looking at the industry as a means of getting their research done.
This is an issue not just with AT&T, but lots of other research labs out there. If you look at some of the top conferences on AI, Graphics and the like (SIGGRAPH for instance) - you have an alarmingly high percentage of people performing cutting edge work from Microsoft Research.
So, it does look like MS-R is becoming a destination for a lot of good researchers out there - however, the collective prowess of other places like IBM, Intel and Xerox might just be able to bring in a balance.
The good thing is that this brings money for research and researchers. The bad thing is that all the patents of tomorrow in a lot of the cool technologies will be 0wnzer0ed by MSFT - where would that lead OpenSource in terms of a future - if all the technology that is to come is patented?
Its a double edged sword.
Well, this is a very common problem. I remember when I went for interviews in 2000...all the reps at Raytheon and Boeing were saying how a huge part of their workforce was going to retire, and all that knowledge was going to walk right out the door.
Clearly, your hiring patterns have to be continuous. You can sit out economic cycles, but you can't sit out entire generations.
It's a nice idea - every company has their own pure research division to solve all those interesting problems, and the IP stays within the company... except, very few companies can afford to do this.
Then again, look at what's come out of these sorts of pure research labs: C, UNIX, WIMP interfaces, etc., even Java, to some extent, could well be considered the output of such a process.
These aren't technologies you can bottle and sell. The value of these sorts of things is the productivity gains they provide. That's not to say the bottle and sell it approach hasn't been tried, but in the end the real meat is often in the abstract ideas, and even with the current patent system you can't patent purely abstract concepts. That is, all these ideas have been cloned, reinvented, or otherwise copied in one form or another.
Which brings me to my point - if you can't bottle it and sell it, if your competitors are just going to end up making a near duplicate anyway, why are you trying to fund this research lab all by yourself? No one doubts the quality of the work that can come out of these places, so why aren't there more cases of a group of various companuies banding together to fund a research group*? I'm not even talking about joining up with your direct competition - surely it wouldn't be that hard to have a group of companies that are not directly competing yet are all interested in managing to bring about a new, better, computer interface etc.
This "go it alone" attitude is sinking a lot of potentially incredibly valuable research simply because companies don't seem to be able to cooperate.
Jedidiah
* Note, for instance, that OSDL is exactly this sort of thing. A research group funded by a wide range of backers all interested in pushing forward computing. And it seems to be a model that's working well!
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
At least the research in university isn't (as) tainted as in the industry. If we can get the top researcher to make great and open contributions to the science, it's all the better.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Well, researchers are often paying their own way except if they are one of the chairs, which they are offered some complimentary registration fee. Some of bonafide conferences actually pay their expenses if they are invited.
Honestly, researcher communities (especially the academic ones) are disdainful to the "achievements" of "industrial research". The reject rates on industrial papers have been pretty high (usually more than 50%). This is because that the "innovations" of industrial "research" are more or less either one or some of the following: rehashing old ideas, implementing old ideas with new looks / new aspects / into new problems which often not worth mentioning, combining several old ideas in some obvious ways.
Well, this is not to say that industrial papers are crap, but of course there are some excellent industry researchers, which are usually ex-professors which are already well known before they enter the industries. However, research is like a big gamble: either you win big or you lose big. Given the current situation of the economy, it's more likely you lose big because of "lack of genuinely new ideas" and you can never get a guarantee that your research group is actually producing the great useful results for your company. It's a whole lot better for the company to actually scour the conferences, spot the prominent person with the right ideas, and then "steal" them so that they can implement the said idea for your company. This is exactly what Microsoft has been doing in the past years.
Since I never attended trade/business oriented conferences, I can't comment on those. Moreover, these conferences are usually way more expensive than the academia ones (thousands of $$ vs hundreds of $$).
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
but I dont understand why the shift from industrial research to university research is necessarily a bad thing?
most of the newest and brightest ideas are coming from the younger generation who is more able to "think outside the box." I mean just look at the ideas from the previous story on high school kids. these kids are obviously not going directly into a company braintrust but to a university.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. ..nuff said
Think global, act loco
I challenge any of you to name something that is original and open source.
Mosaic?
I challenge any of you to name something that is original and open source.
TeX
once they renamed radio as "wireless" and everything else as "digital" and discovered they can just keep selling the same old shit forever.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I challenge any of you to name something that is original and open source.
Tron. Do I get a prize?
Adjusted for population, the number of Brains remains shockingly constant. Rather than a 'Brain Drain' this is merely a brain redeployment or 'rebraining' for short.
<cough...> dialing...
AT&T operator assistance... if you need a phone number, please press or say "one" now...
"One"
Thank You. What City?
<Hoarsley...> "Atlanta"
Thank You. What State?
"Georgia"
Thank You. Please hold for the number..
<Cough...>
Thank You. Goodbye!
Oh yeah... they're really making progress in natural language processing and speech recognition!its called capitalism.
so guess what, you can't compete, you fail.
and thats GOOD.
I guess that's why there are no flying cars yet.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It's obvious that manufactoring is not the way. Labour is so much cheaper in the developing world. We have to be ahead of the curve and do the development and research to stay in the front.
I see a terrible future ahead where research and production take place outside the western world. We will be left as consumers and hairdressers.
TCAP-Abort
Wasn't the group that was spun off as Lucent originally part of AT&T Labs? If so, that had to be a huge change when they went on their own. How did they decide what stayed in AT&T and what went to Lucent?
I remember, back in 1987 or so, getting a good look at a computer industry study that showed gross revenues, margins, and so forth for pretty mich all of the companies in what one would consider "the computer industry" of the time. It also showed how much they spent on R&D.
Sperry spent a decent amount; so did Cray, and Hewlett Packard, and AT&T, and NCR, and so forth.
IBM spent more on R&D than the rest of them put together.
In fact, IBM spent more on R&D than the gross revenues of the second-largest company. Not the profits, mind you -- the gross revenues.
That was the single most gobsmacking business statistic that I heard until the one a couple of years ago about how Microsoft could purchase the airline industry out of its cash reserves -- twice .
For all that money, for all those years,
for all those people, the list of accomplishments
doesn't seem that compelling.
Like aerospace and military, the telecoms industry did push early days computers. However it has been the industrial sector and since then the consumer sector which has driven the smaller, faster and cheaper computing.
For example, one might argue that modems were a spin off from Rockwell aerospace. However, that would have left us with 300 baud modems the size of a PC. It took the comsumer age to drive us to 56k Compact Flash format modems.
We have a lot to thank the pioneers for, but after a while they get beyond their usefulness/effectiveness.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"thank god I'm going to UT-Dallas this fall"
where the professors have huge peckers.
I smell a slimy f*ing "off topic" a*hole troll behind a misleading email address.
Is this plain enough for you?
And, if it does apply, is there anything to be learned from the lab's current demise, i.e., with respect to characterizing patents as a mere agent of dominance for Big Industry?
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
YHBT YHL HAND
The president of AT&T Labs insists the organization is helping AT&T's bottom line. ...........He promised more advances in high-speed data over wireless networks and power lines, and technology to aggregate voice and e-mail messages.
Let's see how they will notch out my KW on 40 meters with their BPL technology when they don't have any *GOOD* engineers left.
--fatboy
I was at conference at Bell Labs/Lucent not too long ago and I think part of what is happening is a natural shift in what matters in corporate research. I got the sense that Bell Labs was shifting slightly from its physics/hardware roots to math/algorithms/software future. They still do physics, but they also do proportionally more R&D in the idea/software space. (Disclaimer: I didn't see any budget figures or top secret stuff, so who knows what they really goes on in Murray Hill)
I'm not saying that we should stop R&D on hardware, solid state physics and materials, only that new software and software-related tools would help everyone get the most out of the current portfolio of hardware technologies. Given that we just discussed "Why Programming Still Stinks" and have not discussed "Why Hardware Still Stinks," I would suggest that the bigger research opportunites are in software.
I also suspect that software is more commercialization-friendly. If you look at research advances in hardware/materials it takes 20 years before it makes it out of the lab. By the time a fundamentally new invention is in mass-production its is off-patent. I know BellLabs invented the transistor and the laser, but I wonder what fraction of semiconductor and laser industry's profits actually went to BellLabs/AT&T. In contrast, software can be more self contained and follow a much faster adoption curve.
In summary, I would say that scientists and engineers already have a reasonably good handle on atoms and that the real R&D opportunities are in getting better with bits.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"I see a terrible future ahead where research and production take place outside the western world. We will be left as consumers and hairdressers"
There are two things you can do to deal with the "problem" of 3rd World workers being better. We can whine about it, or we can work better.
Must not forget C, Unix, telecommunication networks, even the practical transistor was a product of the lab.
With out old Ma-Bell, we wouldnt be sitting here discussing anything...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Talent leak drains AT&T think tank Once a bastion of cutting-edge research, it's lost its star power Sunday, March 21, 2004 BY KEVIN COUGHLIN Star-Ledger Staff When AT&T Labs was carved from Bell Labs in the 1995 breakup of AT&T , the telecom giant set lofty goals for its new research arm. "Our mission, in my view, is to invent the future of communications," proclaimed Alexander "Sandy" Fraser, who pushed to create AT&T Labs. From Our Advertiser Today, many of AT&T's top scientists still chase that dream -- somewhere else. They strive to invent the future in the shiniest ivory towers and hottest tech companies, from MIT to Microsoft, from the Pentagon to Google. Some 200 scientists -- nearly half the core research staff -- were let go from AT&T Labs in Florham Park in January 2002 amid sweeping corporate cuts throughout AT&T. Since then an all-star collection of researchers has bolted from the labs. The fate of AT&T Labs mirrors changing fortunes at AT&T, an American icon squeezed by bad investments and bad timing. More importantly, some scientists say, it raises tough questions about the direction of industrial research and America's future as an innovator. At AT&T Labs, the brain drain is so severe, observed Michael Kearns, now at the University of Pennsylvania, that his former employer's motto should be "404 Not Found" -- the error message that greets many searches on the labs' Web site. Defectors point to the loss of esteemed colleagues, cuts in long-range research and restrictions on travel, media contacts and publication of scholarly articles. The place has had three different vice presidents of research within the past year. For some researchers, the last straw was having to pay their own way to present scientific papers at prestigious conferences. For others, it was the elimination of free espresso and bottled water at the leafy Florham Park campus, once the estate of Vanderbilt descendants. Yet many remember the brief heyday of AT&T Labs, during the euphoria of the Internet boom, as the most thrilling time of their careers. For them, the exodus is a tragedy. "We had a national gem," said Avi Rubin, who exposed flaws in electronic voting systems last year as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. "To see it melt away is very painful," said Andrew Odlyzko, who sensed trouble brewing in 2001 and left to head a digital technology center at the University of Minnesota. While turmoil at AT&T Labs is a bonanza for places like Columbia University and the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, scientists say it underscores the decline of "blue-sky" research -- science for science's sake -- at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, IBM, General Electric and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Gone from AT&T Labs, or nearly so, are groups highly regarded for their long-term studies in artificial intelligence and machine learning, network security and cryptography, algorithms and theoretical computer science, and statistics. AT&T research operations in Cambridge, England, and at the University of California, Berkeley are gone, too. The National Science Foundation says federal support for basic science has waned, as well, since 1980. "It's an open question where the next big ideas and discoveries will come from," said Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. A former adviser to AT&T Labs, Saffo warned that corporate America's "relentless race for short-term value is killing our future ... AT&T Labs was a national crown jewel -- and it's been terribly devalued."
"If you're focusing on research that's short-term, to impact products in a year or two, there are all kinds of world-changing discoveries that you simply miss," said Maria Klawe, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and dean of engineering at Princeton University.
Princeton has cherry-picked at least two AT&T Labs scientists since 2002; Klawe interviewed another this month. The university even created an institute for materials sci
As a former labs person, one who was included in last years outsourcing, it is not a surprise to see this happen. For right or wrong the new management has chosen this path and they are succeeding in an alarming rate. What they are succeeding at I have no idea beside the destruction of the Labs and the company as a whole. Am I a bitter ex-employee? sure... but that doesn't change the fact that that it is happening.
The president of the labs is to credit or blame as you see fit. He has a strategy and he is going about it quickly. Is it a good strategy? Time will tell, but it is not one I believe in, nor do I believe in their president, even when I was a loyal employee. He is downsizing research and development and trying to buy off the shelf products for a company that really has no peer in size. Let's face it, the reason why AT&T had to develop all of their own stuff internally was because there was no one on the outside developing towards that market and could achieve the quality that was desired. They have special needs that outside vendors, for the most part, can't fill, but they try and stick the square peg into the round hole.
Aggies can't read.
This is how it is all going. Walt Disney Imagineering (or WED Enterprises back in the day) was the shit, and then -- slowly -- over the past 20 years -- it has been slowly dismantled. Wall Street isn't just doing this to AT&T -- they're doing it to everyone...
"Let's see. How about the Internet? Email? Web server and web browser.... "
yup, you've managed to pick three project all inspired, created or mapped out by privately funded researchers (anyone even heard of doug englebart...)
Djvu
...richie - It is a good day to code.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: for the past hundred years or more, the rest of the industrialized world looked to the United States for advanced research, innovative ideas and new technologies, if not new products. Now we are being surpassed on nearly every level, and we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Time for us to get the lead out, get back to work, and start competing again. I'm sick and tired of hearing about how we can't compete with near-slave labor, how India has raised so many super-smart engineers and scientists that we don't have any hope ... that's baloney. We are the ones that proved to the rest of the world that there is a better way, that abject poverty need not be the lot of the average human being. I simply don't believe that after a mere two hundred-odd years America has peaked: we can get back on track if we accept a few facts.
The Japanese have always looked at business as a kind of battleground. China and India are taking much the same tack with us. Now that's fine: there's nothing wrong with stiff competition, in and of itself. If you understand that and work hard to improve your own operations, everyone wins.
The problem is we, as a nation, haven't fully realized that we're smack in the middle of an economic war. Certainly our corporate leaders have not: they are, in fact, actively giving aid and comfort to the enemy! Were they in the military, they would be summarily executed for profiteering. These people, as well as many members of the government, need to be made aware of some things. For example, I don't believe that good business practices should involve the total destruction of one's own workforce (and just incidentally, one's best customers) nor should it involve massive transfers of technology and proprietary information to foreign "partners". Partners who, I might add, are more than likely to simply take that information while giving nothing in return. Protectionism (in the sense of the government dropping huge tariffs on foreign suppliers) is not a real answer, but on the other hand simply giving away everything you have of value, everything you have spent years and billions of dollars to develop, is just plain stupid. Yet that is precisely what is going on.
I'm sure that most of us know of companies that took their manufacturing and/or engineering operations to China, say, and then found themselves to be nothing but hollowed-out marketing organizations totally dependent upon foreign suppliers. We allow this to happen, because they don't perceive "good business" in the same way the Western world does, and we don't understand that. At all. That doesn't mean we can't do business with China to the benefit of all, but we simply have to learn how to do it.
I'm reminded of Yamamoto's words after the attack on Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant." Well, I think it is past time that America woke up from it's decades long slumber and started to compete again. It can be done: we just have to convince each other of that fact, be willing to accept significant changes in the way we do business, and convince Congress to let us do it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This situation reminds me of the mid-nineties, where technology companies were laying off in droves. The only ones that stayed were the researchers that had no choice due to talent or life situation.
In my former company, their research arm all but died. We once did very very cool things. Now the company is just a shell trying to make the best of it's past glories.
Just you wait until the foreign competition catches up. Remember the U.S.'s leadership in consumer electronics? Where did THAT go?
With the big downsizing then. Then come back for the split in 1996 and watch it happen again. AT&T and Lucent were doomed in each of these downsizings, becuase the method they used to downsize encouraged the BEST workers to leave with incentives.
In the 1994 downsizing, I could have stayed around, but ended up finding a new job 1 week after notification that I was at risk. I collected a total of 11 weeks pay to go somewhere else and take a raise.
In 1996, I left Lucent to another downsizing and realized a doubling of my pay.
So, each time, the people that stay are the deadwood, and they repeat the process.
AT&T may have been "mugged by Wall Street", but in other cases, like General Electric, the reason is pure and simple greed. Corporate leaders like Jack "Neutron Jack" Welch, who were so fixated on the stock price and the bottom line, that they gutted anything that didn't produce immediate results.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The protion that became Lucent originally started as Western Electric and other companies, way back when. These companies were split out to be a supplier of hardware, while AT&T was supposed to supply service.
Bell Labs was thrown in to balance the three way split.
What was fun was splitting the payroll system (I was the Lucent side DBA)
When AT&T was "The Phone Company", it funded bell labs with an internal "tax". That means that every department in the company would take 10% off the top of what they brought in and send it to bell labs. It was very well funded and the R&D consistently paid off.
Now the stock market is a major player in moving money in and out of compaines and they don't like research. It even appears that most of the major funds consider it a bad gamble in most cases. The side effects of the short sighted profit is that the US economy is loosing 1.3 billion dollars a day and the pyramid scheme that used to prop up some of the economy is falling apart.
Congress needs to start intorducing tax cuts for real R&D.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
U.S leadership in consumer electronics ... how long ago is that? 30 years? :)
As the article points out, Bell Labs still exists - at Lucent. In the breakup, "Bell Labs" stayed with Lucent. AT&T Labs was formed, and got some of the Bell Labs people - but the name (and most of the people) went to Lucent.
:-)
Bell Labs has certainly had lots of layoffs at Lucent - but not as bad as what is being described at AT&T.
I'd certainly tell you that Bell Labs has lots of great people, and is doing lots of great research - but I'm probably a bit biased...
Mike
The lay offs at bell-labs have had a massive negative imapact on plan9.
Rob Pike has gone to google for instance
Stories of them taking out 75% of the light bulbs in the labs to save money.
We're down to three devs from the labs working on plan9, mostly in their own time.
So sad, Lucent have bungled it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It's the same story at the "real" Bell Labs at Lucent; their research has fallen to the lowest possible levels, witness the fraud that was Henrik.
While AT&T was a monopoly, the researchers could suck out as much money as they needed. Now that the monopoly and the money's gone, they need to work their political skills. The good guys have all left, the politicians are left behind.
the funding has nothing to do with weather the project is open source or not. you've missed the point. open source doesn't not need to = no funding. when will people understand this?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The biggest inventions out of ATT are
LASER
information processing theory
Upon what list do you base this drivel? Let's just pick one technology area. How about multi-gigabyte disk drives? IBM innovations are all over that industry. Partial response read channels, MR heads, improved disk materials... The list goes on and on. The same can be said for Bell (AT&T Labs). Some bonehead said these labs hadn't affected their life much. How about the entire modern communications infrastructure? How about integrated circuits? (Based on Bell Labs inventions.)
...
This whole thread has been annoying in the obvious misunderstanding that most research is about software. What a joke. The vast majority of research dollars go into the understanding of physical processes and phenomena, not to mention semiconductor device development, molecular computing (devices), nanotechnology,
Research is typically NOT a computer geek sitting up until all hours coming up with a faster way to sort and prefetch data! You folks need to get out more often.
Wall street lap dog companies are going to self implode in the next 10 - 20 years mark my words. to these chumps who are only intrested in make a quick buck by raising share prices for a day via inreased venue announcments only see R&D as a drain on the company caused by some men in white coats playing games. what these pony tail wearing yuppies don't understand is that it takes years and years of R&D to get new technology to market. you'd think they would understand R&D is an investment, just like an investment there is a risk you'll lose money but in general you'll stand to make a tidy return over time.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Oh realy?
;-) )
Let see... we went from vaccume tubes to transistors...
300 baud modems to 56.k and then to broadband...
20 Megabyte (yes megabyte) HardDrives to 500GB and beyond
Low-Grade analog tapes to CD's...
70's disco clothing/clothes ala Miami Vice to modern styles (arguably the biggest accomplishment of the 90s
Perhaps you're not over the age of... 15, or what have you (and I'm not even sure what body of work from that time period you're referring to) but saying that the last 30 years of tech research are less than compelling is amusing to me....
Compare it to most other time periods in the history of the world and I think you'll find the increased scientific progress compelling. Our understanding of the universe and our ability to adapt it has _never_ grown at the pace it has been in the last 200 years. (IMHO, of course)
Carly Fiorina is the CEO of HP.
I'm missing out on the connection to how Carly Fiorina had the authority to cut AT&T labs.
- Transistors.
- Information theory.
- Graph Theory. (Especially as related to signal interconnectivity and switching.)
I could go on for pages. (One copy of the Bell Labs Journal collected back issues took up several shelves in the University library when I was a freshman - in 1965 - and much of that related to or enabled some aspect of comptuers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I worked at Bell Labs in Columbus, OH for ten years when I first got out of school. Great place, interesting work, and lots of very smart people. Most of the folks I knew there are gone. When AT&T split into AT&T / Lucent, the Columbus Labs went with Lucent. The management of Lucent then proceeded to run the company into the ground. The dotcom bust and telecom implosion (i.e. Worldcom) didn't help either.
Today the Lucent branch of Bell Labs is a shadow of it's former greatness. It's ranks have been decimated, and most of what's left is being shipped overseas. A rather sad and undeserving epitaph for what was once one of America's premier R&D institutions.
P.S. For any BTL alumni out there - I worked in area 59 - on speech recognition in Conversant, and then on DCS (the Display Construnction Set) - a UIMS for network management.
[Insert pithy quote here]
engelbart = DARPA (govt) + stanford
internet = DARPA (govt) and public and private univ.
web server = CERN? (europe) + NCSA (govt)
browser = NCSA (govt)
SCO, to their credit, is the only company who seems to be determined to cash in on some of that old Bell Labs Intellectual Property. [Understandably, SCO also harbors a deep, abiding grudge against IBM for the way they were betrayed in Project Monterey.]
But, in the world of oenophilia, Mondavi's Opus One is an utter and complete joke:
> The truth is, none of the world-class pure research labs (Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, TJ Watson, etc.) do a good job of helping their parent companies in the long run.
I used to work at Bell Labs. The amount of money made from patents and intellectual property licenses derived from Bell Labs research is staggering. You have no idea.
There one around (I don't remember which) that was still generating >100M a year more than 20 years after it was filed.
IP is where the money from research is made.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
First, most industrial conference fees are not in the thousands of dollars. About five hundred is more typical. These conferences do, after all, want good attendance. Second, it is rather unusual for employees to pay their own way to conferences, especially out of town ones (which most are). Third, research is by no means all or nothing. Most of it is incremental improvememnt on existing science, and gives a corresponding return on investment. Sometimes a radicial advancement is made, and this can make headlines, but that is the exception, not the rule. Fourth, you accuse companies of "stealing" ideas at conferences. Well that's the whole idea, ding dong. When one presents a paper at a conference, it's to disseminate ideas. People are supposed to "steal" them, and I take great pride when people steal mine.
I am a software developer and researcher in geophysics. In that community at least, the top researchers are about evenly divided between industry and academic, and no, the industrial researchers are NOT mostly ex-professors.
I have never detected any disdain for industry researchers from university researchers - indeed there are many consortiums between them. I suspect most academics are jealous of industrial researchers because they often have better financial backing and are involved in more "real world" problems. I also think industrial researchers are jealous of academics because they have more time and freedom to tackle basic, pure research. Together they make a powerful combination.
So far as your assessment of the quality of conference papers from industry is concerned, it's just complete garbage. Free enterprize is a highly stimulating environment that attracts talented people, and the papers reflect that. The weakest papers, I'm afraid, tend to be from graduate students, although I have seen many excellent ones. Sometimes, too, overtly commercial papers get presented, although conferences fight to minimize this.
Your rant is misinformed pretty well from top to bottom. I can't imagine why you would make such nonsense up, but it has no relation to reality.
Who would want to work in such a hell?
To do list for Windows
What a tard. The number of Nobel prizes is (essentially) fixed. It has nothing to do with the quantity or quality of research in a given year.
Nano technology is the future and silicon is going to run out soon in terms of how much smaller can you get the circuits
I agree 100% with you. Nanotechnology is the future. But that does not make it a wise R&D investment. Recall that Drexler wrote his Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology back in 1986. Anybody who patented stuff in that book got nothing for it -- 1986 patents expired last year. Despite nearly 2 decades of additional effort, we still don't have commerical nanotechnology. Someday, people will make money on nanotechnology, but I bet it won't be the pioneers.
Universities have been researching mathmatical algorithms for decades.
Yes they have, but not the ones that might make a different in business. The academic world places too much emphasis on analytic tractability -- professors and scholoarly journals like to see nice theories with closed-form equations. But many real-world problems don't reduce to equations that are tractable for the purposes of getting a Ph.D. or tenure. Companies like SAP and i2 (and Wal-Mart for that matter) make billions of dollars on applied math that most academics wouldn't touch.
But the real argument is you can not patent numbers of formulas so its unprofitable in case they do discover the ultimate algorithm.
For better or worse, you can patent software. But even if you cannot patent the software, you can still make money on it. If you embed the software in proprietary hardware (like a Lucent firewall or switch), use it internally to run the company, or offer it as a service running on closely-held binaries, then you don't need a patent.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The "loss of free espresso and bottled water" contributed to this situation? Come on! Grow a spine!
IBM research has been instrumental in the development of IBM products (computer architecture, databases, semiconductorss...).
Anyway, American companies are moving in the direction of not making anything anymore, because consistent short term quarterly profits require that companies only sell services and invent nothing but marketing and smokescreens. Perhaps there is no alternative given that American education and culture are not likely capable of sustaining much output of competent, altruistic individuals capable of old fashioned American innovation. But, to most American corporations it is ok that the rest of the world picks up the slack, just so long as we Americans are able to continue raking in the cash.
Your comment is not original, so it doesn't qualify.
Thats why Microsoft is a good thing, they have loads of cash and can bring forth some good research since they have the capital to do so. Building your software for free is not a way to get enough capital for good R&D...
If open source == public domain, you're correct.
AT&T for decades was run like small country with a century long investment horizon guaranteed by federally mandated rates of return.
The last company I knew that pushed the "Play to win" line down on all the employees was Kmart...
Most of the great computing invention was done by monopolies while they still enjoyed their power. You might think MS is the exception because it hasn't created any great inventions, but you'd be wrong - MS isn't a monopoly.
As for the end of Bell Labs: I'm just suprised it didn't happen 20 years ago, when AT&T stopped being a legal monopoly, and had to start acting like a business.
We lost a lot when that happened. Not just all the cool computer science and communications tech. Lots of pure science too.
And a nasty change in the way the phone business worked. In the old days, telephone equiment was made by well-paid, well-treated workers in the U.S. and Canada. And made to last. And when it finally did wear out, it was shipped back to Western Electric factories, where it was thoroughly recycled. Now phone hardware is made by underpaid peons in overseas sweatshops, designed to last a year or two, and finally tossed in a landifll.
But, as the Libertarians love to say, There Is No Free Lunch. (Which is not strictly true, but that's another story.) The price of AT&T's huge contributions to science and expense-blind corporate citizenship was immense. Phone calls were expensive, and telephone equipment could only be leased (it was illegal to sell it) at high rates. Forget going out and buying a cheap modem -- if you wanted to do dialup, you had to lease a "data set" (a huge, clunky slow terminal-modem combination) for a horrendous rate. Not that modems weren't availabe -- starting in the 70s, they were, and cost less to buy than a month's lease on a data set. But it was illegal to hook them directly to the phone system (they might break something!). Which is how the acoustic coupler got invented.
There are what, 100 million internet-connected computers and devices in the US? Probably a similar number of cell phones. Back in the 70s, when the Bell System was at its peak that's how many phones there were total. And only a tiny number of them were mobile or used to transmit data. I can't imagine such a geological shift in technology with AT&T continuing its total dominance of the communications marketplace. And without AT&T, no Bell Labs.
I wish they'd drain Bjarne Stroustrup outta there. Christ what a piece of shit he is.
Outside of drugs/biotech and automotive, it's hard to think of any major US corporate research labs not in decline.
While you can thank Bell Labs for Information Theory, the laurels for Graph Theory belong to Euler.
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
It occurs to me that researchers of this caliber shouldn't have any problems finding new jobs.
If AT&T no longer thinks it's economically feasible to run an "R&D powerhouse" - that doesn't mean the concept itself is dead or dying.
I'm told 3M is one such company, that does lots of "pure research" in order to come up with new products. Of course, IBM and Microsoft are mentioned - because they're already known to do this and have deep pockets. But R&D is the key to long term advancement of ANY business.
Apple surely knows this, and I think it's fair to say all of the major auto-makers do too. (After all, who do you think designs and builds all the concept cars you see at the auto shows?)
All this signifies, in my mind, is a shift in *where* innovations and new patented ideas/products come from. Perhaps AT&T labs' decline should have been forseen as long ago as the Bell breakup, really. The torch is simply changing hands.
I think they'll be surprised how many Slashdot readers live in zip code 10101 and are 101 years old.
Why's everyone so gaga about Bell Labs? I'm sooooo tired of listening to the whining and pining about the good old days when Bell Labs was seen as glittering family jewels. As Moms Mabley would say "I was there in the good ol days and they weren't so good." I worked there for about 20 years on the development side of the house. The place was very far from the land called utopia.
Anonymous Coward (AKA Jesse B. Simple)
For a wide-eyed computer science guy fresh from college, it was a blast. Over the years, I managed to have breakfast with Arno Penzias (yes, the Nobel prize winner), dinner with Dennis Ritchie, and I took Bjarne Stroustrup out to lunch to a nice little Mexican joint. (All the while I was going, "I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!" in my head.) It was such an insanely great place to work.
I got out right before the Lucent split. I saw the writing on the wall way back then. It's really very sad.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
"Eslambolchi, who holds four job titles, compared AT&T Labs to a big league ball team."
Eslambochi is a power hungry bureacrat who has presided over the gutting of the Labs. All the advances he mentions in the article ("advances in speech recognition, natural language understanding and artificial intelligence for automating customer service") are things that existed before he was promoted to running the Labs. There have been no real advances during his tenure (unless one considers more layoffs and less research as advances).
His "Concept of One" idea is amusing to those working at the Labs: we refer to him as Neo, and have figured that his "Concept of One" really refers to the number of employees that will be left when he's done.
All that, and, while laying off people and cancelling research (not to mention any training/travel budgets), guess who got a down payment on his house and a big mortage payment taken care of?
Thanks, Hossein.
Its sad that for Wall Street types nothing is worth doing unless it fits in some shiny consumer dildo.
Poor language skills and belligerence are often signs of brain damage.
I feel this has crippled NASA to this day.Most of them went into the private sector and military research. Great for making money and robot bombs but if we had taken the "SST" folks and combined them with the NASA personal at the time, a few tens 0f billions of dollars we would have a city on the moon and stations on mars with trillions of dollars in cash flow and profit.
I am one of the 19 inch black and white televisions in the classroom watching the apollo liftoff's generation.
man what a dream we had then.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
Anyhow, the point of all this is that (a) Lucent got the lion's share of Bell Labs in the '96 spinoff, including the name; and (b) the "real" Bell Labs has been downsized just as badly as its former sibling at AT&T, although Lucent is slightly ahead of the business curve and is hopefully through the worst of the cost-cutting. (Lucent was also first in line when it was time to go over the cliff, of course, so being ahead of the curve doesn't always work to your advantage.)
(The obligatory disclaimer: I work for Lucent, but I'm not even vaguely attempting to speak on their behalf. I'm sure AT&T veterans would tell the tale differently, emphasizing the heroic role of AT&T Labs in the liberation of Stalingrad or some such, but this is what passes for corporate history in my weak and enfeebled mind.)
1973-The laser printer invented at Xerox PARC
This did earn X a few good bux
1973 also saw the invention of Ethernet there and lots of other things of interest.
There is a PARC history timeline at here
agreed (as to the phase shift in R&D).
R -> D, largely, with R relegated to universities, despite
a few rare exceptions, such as genentech in bio.
yet, this is not a problem, as academic institutions have
vigorous patent out-licensing depts. which make sure
the good stuff has a shot at commercialization in a
win-win scenario with industry.
your bit about apple is perceptive, although one of the
first acts of amelio/jobs upon returning was to decimate
the corporate library as a frilly distraction. intriguingly,
they were right about innovation in GUI as not needing
to depend upon empire-building of SIGCHI-types like
kay/tognazzini/nielsen in favor of a few good programmers
overseen by managers and designers with taste (sjobs/ive).
back to bell labs (in re: the 'gucci lab') --
waxing nostalgically for the calibre of thompson/ritchie/
kernighan/pike is indeed a useful baseline.
yet, why does it take the efforts of the second string
(stallman/torvalds) to bring systems design borne
from great R&D to ultimate relevance?
The truth is, none of the world-class pure research labs (Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, TJ Watson, etc.) do a good job of helping their parent companies in the long run. How much money did Bell Labs directly make on the transistor? The Laser? The C programming Language? C++? Unix succeeded in large parts despite the efforts of USL. Look at how successful Xerox PARC made Apple, but not Xerox. Very few companies now do much pure research for this very reason.
How much did the invention of the transistor and the laser help the digital revolution? A ton.
How much of AT&T's modern revenues are due to that revolution? A vast chunk.
How much of the increase in printed and copied documents is due to the innovations made at Xerox? A huge amount.
How much of Xerox's modern revenues are a result? A vast chunk.
Looked at purely as a return on investment, a huge amount of research done at Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM labs has payed off spectacularly. The way it payed off was to grow the entire market. Unfortunately, business folks *really* do not understand that concept. They only understand market share. A smart executive at Xerox would do better to concentrate on his own market's growth than to look enviously over at Apple's success.
Does advanced research help your market share? Probably not. Does it grow the market? Most certainly yes. Is it a good way to get promoted as an executive? Unfortunately not, and that is the fault of our flawed business culture.
Microsoft pours billions into research each year and from what I can tell they have not produced a product for MS or even a seminal non-commercial work.
Sure maybe one day we will all be a nation of creative geniuses and biotech gurus, but that will take a generation. Sorry but work-retraining programs are basically a way to teach people how to drive a forklift.
Except that W. James McNerney, Jr., a product of the GE management machine, became the Chairman of the Board and CEO of 3M in recent years.
I remember the chills that went through the research department when that happened (I was an intern in fiber optics at the time), and indeed, the writing was on the wall for imminent changes. The traditional "15% rule", whereby researchers could spend 15% of their time on their own research ideas which often lead to very innovative, lucrative new products (e.g., Post-It notes, UV-hardened polymer), was in jeopardy when I left. I'm not sure where that went since then, as I'm not privy to the 3M internals.
Here's an interesting link on 3M research culture, BTW. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Yeah, right, that's why IBM sold its disk drive research labs to Japanese giant Hitachi, because, um, research leads to long term success. US trade policy currently demands the sale of nearly half a trillion dollars of corporate property to foreign owners this year alone, not to mention the trillions of dollars of past ownership transfers.
That's why US corporations can't afford to fund long term research; They barely have access enough to US markets to survive, let alone protectionist foreign markets. Look at economic history, rather than bogus economic theory, and you'll see that EVERY TIME a nation is a rising industrial power rather than a declining one, that nation has aggressive industrial trade policies and strong protection for internal industries. The US rose that way in the 1800's, and is in downsizing and outsourcing decline now, having abandoned any care for its ability to produce products.
When economists say "it's ok, the US is the country that INNOVATES" they're only backed up by the fact that in the PAST US corporations funded basic research because they had protected internal markets that gave them the long term profitability to afford long term investments. But now, under "free trade" US corporations can't afford to invest in research. The innovation will follow the production to countries whose governments care about production and national profit rather than only caring about current consumption.
When ever there's an IP related article, majority of the posters post about the evils of IP. Yet, in this article, slashdotters are not supporting the reduction of staff at the Bell Labs even though BL leads the way in generating the "evil" IPs for the corporation.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I see the Americans have finally learned the fine art of understatement
Auto companies do research because they actually have to make something themselves, but US auto company research was very badly damanged when the US government opened the US auto market to Japan without requiring Japan to open their own market at all. It's all about economies of scale. If you open your market and your competitor doesn't, they effectively have your market and theirs as well, and you now have only half of your own market. Of course they now can out compete you, since they have much deeper engineering and R&D budgets.
Add to that situation the fact that the Bush administration used the famous "hydrogen economy* speech to cover up the wholesale cancellation of research funding for hybrid vehicles (boy the oil companies really hate those, I mean, they actually WORK, and worse, they're PRACTICAL!!!! What the hell were those researchers THINKING???) and you have yet another situation where US producers were totally screwed by the US government.
Sarnoff labs had excellent HDTV technology, and the US computer industry begged Congress to hold off on HDTV for just a couple of years because CPU speeds were almost fast enough for the PC industry to really compete in video (at the time the state of the art was a still inadequate 90mhz Pentium) but they weren't there yet, so guess what the US government did? They picked the Japanese standard and tried to require the cable networks to carry the signals by law. I remember the hearings, and several US computer company executives told Congress that if the government committed this act of economic treason, Japan would make enough profit to buy out the US computer industry. On a side note, IBM just sold its entire disk drive division, including all its patents and storage systems research labs, to Hitachi of Japan. This year's trade deficit is enough to buy Intel and Microsoft combined.
When some MBA thug who spouts sports metaphors gets put in charge of a research lab, it's the same old story: A has been jock who likes beating up on "useless" geeks. The most productive research to engage in at that point is figuring out how to inject a baseball bat up the thug's ass at an extremely high velocity, as a method of communication to higher management that when it comes to controlling the lives of science nerds, jocks are not welcome and need not apply.
Yeah, but at least they spent the money on real stuff producing real results.
I have seen "research" companies where groups bloated their annual budget so that they could buy laser printers that would never get used, and other extra stuff. Wasteful. One didn't that impression with Bell Labs, where researchers actually cared about producing innovative things to the best of their ability.
And "Wall Street types" are scary because their credentials are practically non-existent. I personally know of an English major who became a "Wall Street analyst", which is something of a joke: a student who can't even hack the mathematics to get a degree in economics is making recommendations?
Another famous Wall Street type: Henry Blodget. Check out his background. Similar story.
I think this is a pattern on Wall Street. It's a legitimate cause for concern.
Some references: Bell Labs NoBell.org
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Long may they wave. Cragen
The brand of Oorporate Capitalism that America has evolved is only after low lying fruits--they will only conduct cheap, short-term research that will produce small incremental advances. Then money will be put into marketing to push that small improvement.
THe long-term research needed to go after substantial costs is increasingly being abandoned in favor of going after low lying fruit. No need for the AT&T hard core research, or for Xerox, or Lucent/bell, or for Sun.
Corporate capitalism and financial engineering reign supreme! Cut taxes to the minimum! Celebrate the return of the Gilded Age! No need for tax-funded research, either. THe Invisible Hand will provide for us all.....(just be sure to put your wallet in your front pocket).
Thankfully, the social democracies and their kin will still be doing some actual breakthrough-oriented research.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
"1. Text to speach."
;)
Speech to text is still being worked on
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Guess they're trying, sigh.
No, SAIC bought Telcordia (formerly Bellcore). SAIC has nothing to do with either Bell Labs or AT&T Labs.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Can I observe I am one of those people who is (currently) paid to work on an OSS project, a distributed deployment framework called SmartFrog.
I am doing this as part of my day job as a Computing Researcher at HPLabs, an organisation which hasnt (yet) suffered the knife of death in it, but still has to deal with a slow death of many cuts.
Why are we doing OSS work? Because (a) we know we can get something back from the community (academic as well as pure OSS), (b) its what users expect, and (c) as we dont have a software business any more, how else can you ship it.
OSS makes a great platform for doing CS research; I know lots of people who use it. Take Jean "Linux WLAN" Tourhilles, or David Mossberger, one of the leads on the IA64 ports of Linux.
Its good for research as in closed source, MS have such a monopoly that you cannot innovate, and even if you get access to Win2K source, you cannot share your works with others. Research and OSS goes hand in hand, be it industrial or academic. Or personal: there is nothing to stop the reader doing innovative stuff at home, be it community WLAN frameworks, new thread scheduling algorithms or better XML parsers.
Pure research is a cool thing to do in your free-time, but this is a Capitalist Age - they've missed opportunities to profit from their research again and again. Of course they have to slim down - pure research isn't a profit model.
Actually, the 68000 did not support protected memory or pre-emptive multi-tasking. The memory protection provided was purely kernel vs everything else, and page faults caused loss of information. One vendor got around the problem by using dual 68000s, only delivering the interrupt to one, and retrieving the lost info from the other, but that was a bit impractical.
The 68020 added barrel shifters to improve the atrocious rotate left and right speeds of the 68000, but the 68030 was the first 68K series chip which was physically capable of both per-process memory protection and pre-emptive multi-tasking. The first Mac to use a 68030 was the Mac II, as I recall. So there was nothing strange about Apple's not implementing pre-emptive multi-tasking and memory protection in MacOS; up until 1987 none of their hardware was capable of it.
(I used to write 68000 assembler for the Atari ST.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
That's what my friend told me. According to his MBA program, companies are not interested in long-term profits. He said that in order to survive a company must post good results every quarter first, then think of what is going to happen in a few years. For him, and many other MBAs, the only thing that matters are the numbers that meet or exceed the estimates when the time comes. I think that this is the major part of this problem.
In the age of corporate greed, layoffs and seven figure CEO salaries, nobody cares about engineers. Sell, sell, sell!!! That's what our life is all about. I know quite a few of engineers who tell their children to do business instead of science becuase that is the reality of this world: science does not pay anymore. Not in this country. Why spend $100,000 on good education in science if you end up selling crap at your local Gap?
Unless Uncle Sam takes his head out of his fat American ass and starts supporting industrial and academic research in THIS country, we are all fucking doomed; that comes from a die hard optimist. It makes me sick when we spend so much money on wars when the brighest and the smartest have to beg for grants. When it comes to separating Egyptian twins or performing a plastic surgery on a burnt girl from Afganistan, this country is here to help. When it comes to giving more money to universities, well, we're too fucking poor.
Have a great day.
Stroustrup saying the lab was "mugged" by Wall Street.
...
That's very true. I work at a headhunting agency for Wall Street companies, and people from AT&T/Telcordia are a very hot commodity. Especially since they can be easily swayed to leave for salaries much higher than measly allowance they (usually) get at AT&T
...from my point of view is that the research labs were (and are) a tiny part of AT&T, and properly funding them would have been a tiny drop in AT&T's bucket of financial woes.
I was lucky enough to work at Shannon Labs a couple of years ago, and to eat lunch in the big cafeteria downstairs and chat in the bump spaces (when free espresso was available) with most of the names in the article. The story is absolutely accurate when it describes the talent at the labs; everybody I met there was doing outstanding work, from the famous to those unknown outside their fields.
During the (frequent) reorganisations of the company, the research labs frequently had to make their case to top AT&T management: the story went that on average, every $1 spent on the labs ended up saving/earning AT&T $5. (I don't know whether that figure is really true or is largely a convenient conclusion of those justifying the research arm's existence; I suspect that nobody can really prove or disprove it.) Worst of all, I calculated at the time of the big layoffs that if the money spent on one or two of the largest acquisitions of other communication companies that went bad and the golden handshakes spent on Mike Armstrong and other top executives were instead invested with a modest rate of return, the dividends would have been enough to fund the operating costs of the research labs forever.
rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/
... in the thread. Outstanding!
zogger