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Rob Pike's Excellent Adventure
Frisky070802 writes "The Newark Star-Ledger has an article about Rob Pike's move from Bell Labs to Google. The article has some interesting points, such as how Pike took a "huge pay cut" to go there just to work on cool things. And in a nostalgia trip for those others of us who've walked the halls of Bell Labs, the article compares earlier days at Bell Labs to the heady days at Google (Claude Shannon on a unicycle, and the famous Penn & Teller trick on Arno Penzias, then the head of Bell Labs research). Most of all are the differences in real-world impact: 'But products trickled slowly, if ever, from [Bell Labs]. They blast from Google at hyperspeed.'" (Painless demographic-only jump-through screen to read it.)
... what the Famous Penn and Teller trick was...
: cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/labscam.html+penn+t eller+arno&hl=en
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:xJ536HFTXwIJ
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
I agree.
Google came up with the idea that popularity (in terms of links) makes a good algorithim to index the Internet, also they came up with the idea that you could serve such an index on a large cluster of cheap machines, instead of a few big expensive ones.
All the other stuff they came up with afterwards wasn't very revolutionary. Web mail? Weather service? Statistic / Index pages? Educational indexes? Specific domain searches? Good services, but not revolutionary.
Bell labs came up with a lot of theory. They created programming languages (B anyone?), operating systems (UNIX and Plan9), compilers, tools, and much, much more, like:
# The first synchronous-sound motion pictures
# Stereophonic sound
# Speech synthesis
# The cathode-ray tube
# The radio altimeter
# Radio astronomy
# The laser
# Solar cells
# Coaxial cable
# Radiotelescopes
# Radar systems
And that's not counting the nearly 25000 patents (most filed way before the great US patent give-away). They've made significant contributions to the fields of Physics, Mathematics, Communications, Computer Science, Astronomy, Aviation, Military Defense, and Power Generation, just to name a few.
Google's got some good stuff, don't get me wrong, but they need to expand thier scope, double thier output, and hang around for another 80 years if they want to top the accolades Bell Labs has accquired.
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Yes, yes, we all know who invented the transistor.
'But products trickled slowly, if ever, from [Bell Labs]. They blast from Google at hyperspeed.'" (Painless demographic-only jump-through screen to read it.)
Well, I guess:
1) ISDN
2) ATM
3) SONET
4) SS7 with respect to use external links to control messaging (aka out of band-signaling)
Well, that is to name a few. Don't forget, Lucent is former bell labs and at one point they were putting out 2 patents a day. Not that I support pattens, but their is a lot of technology that comes out of the labs.
5) Something called UNIX.
The stock market is not about revenue. It is about expected revenue. Currently Google's P/E ratio is at about 115. However, their one-year Forward P/E ratio is about 45. Which isn't that bad for a company that just had an IPO.
Plus, they also have quarterly revenue growth of about 95% and quarterly earnings growth of 475%.
AOL/TW has never done that. AOL/TW will never do that.
What do they do that makes money?
I don't know. But they have revenue of $3.79B and a gross profit of $1.73B for the last 12 months.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG
While those of us in the Usenet community widely applaud Google for their adopting and continued hosting of the archives, it wasn't their idea to start with. Permanent (nonsearchable) archives started with Henry's tapes, over 25 years ago. DejaNews made it searchable. Google figured out how to make enough money doing it to justify having done so and the continuing operations.
Google's doing a lot of good in the world, and making a lot of money off doing it. But there's no reason to give them credit for everything good that's out there. Doing that tends to slight historical contributions and effort of others.
But good on Google for all sorts of other things they have done!
Bell Labs actually built a working one. Although it turned out to have a lot of uses outside telephony, Bell Labs provided the need for it and the R/D funding.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What Bell Labs DID invent was the first Silicon Transistor. This was revolutionary. But to give them the credit for the first Transistor is to dismiss a lot of research which went on before this, as well as to show a general ignorance on the history of Electronics.
It would be similar to all of us forgetting the invention of the Silicon Transistor, when Electron Transistors replace them.
For example, the first Field Effect Transistor (FET) was patented by Dr. Julius Lilienfeld of Germany in 1926. Lilienfeld had other patents, such as patent 1,900,018.
But the bottom line is that transistors were well-known long before 1948; it would be utterly silly to think that a lot of new concepts simply sprouted out of nowhere. It is far more accurate to say that Bell Labs took the old concepts and pushed the envelope, by applying them to a new area.
And it's certainly silly to say that Bell Labs invented the transistor. Please, it's the silicon transistor that they invented.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.