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Rob Pike's Excellent Adventure

Posted by timothy on from the good-work-if-you-can-get-it dept.

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.)

1 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A bit premature to compare to Bell? by ebuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    ---
    Yes, yes, we all know who invented the transistor.