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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.)
Having also recently left Bell Labs it's safe to say at least Bell Labs is dead. You can tell when they close 70% of the bathrooms and shut off every other hallway of lights. All the smart people left, or are semi-retired, most of them before I even joined. It did so many great things in the past century but the executives have a very short memory and sadly ignore any new ideas originating from their own R&D, instead relying on "wall stree sources" or ambiguous "industry trends" which fly in the face of common sense to most of us.
It's probably worthwile to use this latest defection to hold a belated funeral. Plan 9 is probably the last semi-useful project we'll see from that place. I'm also not real sure that Google is the future, so far they're short on product and long on ambiance. Research is fine but unless it's funded by academic sources you gotta have a product too. Ultimately that's what did Bell Labs in.
Were those things really invented by Bell Labs? I know Unix was devolped there, but I thought the transistor and laser were invented elsewhere.
AFAIK:
The transistor was invented by Julius Lilienfeld in the 1920's.
The first (microwave) laser was built at Columbia University.
The first optical laser was built at Hughes Research Laboratories.
Bell Labs used to make stuff that was truly excellent, so I have to disagree with you on that. Most of modern electrical engineering is based on principles developed or derived from subjects they pioneered.
The propaganda started about 25 years ago, around the time the illegal monopoly got what was coming to it. That I agree with.
I know blaming executives is in vogue, but I've worked with the ones in question. The level of corruption (and derived confusion) in that company is epic. I have first hand experiences with how they operate there. It's not trivial finger pointing, it's real. And it's entrenched. Now that I work elsewhere in a far more legit (although less imaginative) environment, I feel very vindicated in this opinion.
My Dad worked at Bell Canada for many years. He claims that the high profits on military contracts did Bell Labs in for producing commercial products because the engineers lost cost discipline skills. Ma Bell broke a long term association (not sure when, 70's 80's?) because they weren't getting good product stuff.
It's one thing to be not mind boggling strong on current products when you are doing basic resaerch and kicking out things like transistors every decade or so. But making money hand over fist with $500 toilet seats will tend to lose you some respect.
Note the dates on the good stuff mentioned earlier. Almost none of it past 1970.
did you miss the part about him being hired PRE IPO.?
In any case, that little gesture of him taking lesser salary, probably got him a few tens of thousands more options at the cool price of $0.99... So guess who is the "wuss" now.
HEH
See for example David Wiseman's history of the recovery or the Salon.com overview article.
In summary, Google only really started encouraging the tape restore project about six months before groups.google.com kicked off. The idea of restoring Henry's tapes had been widely thought of in the 1990s, and Wiseman had picked them up to start the project, but it took some years to accomplish, along with help from various people and some equipment from Brewster Kahle.
And I'm leaving out a bunch of stuff. I won't try and credit everyone involved in the process here, but it was lots of people. Good on all of them.