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Bell Labs Unix Group Disbanded
wandazulu writes "Peter Salus over at UnixReview.com is reporting that AT&T Department 1127, responsible for creating and maintaining Unix, has been officially disbanded. The article provides an interesting "where are they now?" list of the original authors of Unix."
1127 was no longer associted with UNIX. They invented it.
Due to anti-trust restriction, AT&T was never allowed
to market or profit from UNIX.
Unix systems source code was sold a while by AT&T to
Novell which SCO took over.
Joe Ossanna and Lee McMahon. Both made significant contributions which made UNIX, as we know it today, possible.
Another important contributor, Michael Lesk, is currently on the faculty at Rutgers University.
I'm sure there are many more that deserve recognition.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
just for clarity, there hasn't been an AT&T department 1127 since 1996; when Lucent split off, 1127, along with the rest of Bell Labs, went with them. this is a Lucent re-org.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
And Bell Labs gave up Unix _long_ ago:
Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. -- Rob Pike circa 1991
Bell Labs moved from Unix to Plan 9 in the late 80' and then went on to work on Inferno.
Both Plan 9 and Inferno are Open Source now and live on outside Bell Labs, but their developers like to be very quiet, they rather code than talk or maintain websites.
But here are a couple of links:
And also many of the ideas of Plan 9 and Inferno live on as part of other projects like v9fs(9P distributed file system protocol support for Linux), Plan 9 from User Space(a port of many Plan 9 components to Unix), and wmii(a window manager partially inspired by Acme.)
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
"Due to anti-trust restriction, AT&T was never allowed to market or profit from UNIX."
They were free to compete in the computer industry after the divestiture of 1984.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/3b2/
They sold tens of thousands of those things.
WHAT YOU SAY?
[totally obvious whoring, sorry.]
Yeah, why does IBM get the shaft. I am working at that very site as an intern in datamining. There are quite a bit chemists and physicists there that do pure research still. While there are groups focused on product deployment, IBM still has the resources to do research(otherwise I wouldn't be interested). And what's with everyone singing Google's praises? They're just trying to find the next product, not entirely new fields that are only possible through research. I read this article recently from IBM's Think magazine from 1936, it was by the director of Research at GM. It was eery how relevant it was if you just replaced the technologies mentioned. The basic jist was that it made the writer mad when people said research wasn't necessary and was just looking at a way to replace people with technology. He said that this was ridiculous because of the entirely new industries that were created because of research(telegram, telephone, cars). He also mentioned that people who say that everything has been invented, know that it's been said before, but this time is different. I just think that part is great because it was 1936. To me it seems like IBM is one of the few major corporations looking ahead further than the current quarter's earnings.
Bell labs, DEC, and Xerox PARC may be things of the past, but Microsoft is funding a lot of general research today. This is not product R&D but basic research of the sort done at many of the big companies of the past. Check out their website for a list of some current topics. They employ over 700 people doing everything from pure algorithms to graphics to networking.
This is common knowledge(and shared feeling) by anyone that ever had anything to do with Bell Labs.
Some of it even made headlines eons ago, most links seem to be dead by now, but I found a slashdot article about it, title could not be more explicit:
Thompson Critical of Linux, poor ESR was so taken aback that had to go ask for a "clarification" from Ken.
Hell, go read 9fans, not one week goes by without someone expressing how much they 'love' Linux(or Lunix, as it's known there).
Oh, oh, and here is another quote taken directly from the Plan 9 fortunes file:
Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs. - D. Presotto
And of course the classic:
This is not LINUX! This is Plan 9. There are rules. -boyd/walter
Well . . . . Gottfried Leibniz came up with calculus at (broadly speaking) roughly the same time as Newton, but where Newton failed to publicly talk about his work in this regard, Leibniz did. Which then created a huge argument over priority, with poor behaviour on both sides . . . .
The transistor is 1940's technology. Did you know that there's a few zillion of them in the computer that you used to post that? Guess who invented the transistor? Bell Labs.
C|N>K
Yes, the BSD guys; McKusick, Joy, Karels, and a few other people that I have forgotten, have made some huge contributions to the Unix world (you can thank Bill Joy for vi and the C shell). You can also thank them, as well as Bill Jolitz, for being able to run freely available BSD derivatives on your PCs. However, the original Unix 32V sources (which BSD was derived from until Karels decided to purge BSD of all AT&T "taint" in the late 80s), the orignial kernels, the original programs, and many of the original basic ideas came from Bell Labs and from Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Ossana, Pike, Johnson, and many more people that I have also forgotten.
The original Berkeley Software Distribution developers have made an enormous impact on the computer science and computing worlds in general, most notably its TCP/IP implementation. However, let's not forget where BSD actually comes from. BSD is a direct derivative from good-old Bell Labs Unix. Some BSD sources to this day still have some AT&T copyright notices (even though they're under the BSD license).
I guess everyone thinks that Thompson and Ritchie were in the same department during the 1970s, but I do remember always knowing that they were not.
Note that by 1980 UNIX-related OS research at Bell Labs was nearly completed. Development of UNIX, which is where I worked, was very active and remained so for another 10+ years, but that's different from research. (Center 127 did research in many areas unrelated to UNIX.)
So, undoubtedly there was a recent reorg and some department went away, and maybe it was even 1127, but what that means, if anything (since Thompson, Kernighan, and others left a while ago), I have no idea.
Anyway, I think the gist of the article and most of the responses here is that it's sad that AT&T and Lucent are no longer combined and able to spend as lavishly on research as they once did. That part of this thread is true.
A few posts are from Bell Labs people who said it was a great place to work, and that's true, too.
I don't know about that. Google's mission is to "Organize the world's information". Considering such an undertaking has never before been attempted on such a scale (unless you count Yahoo's manual indexing), then I suspect Google engages in quite a bit of advanced research. Why else would they hire brilliant, accomplished PhDs and encourage them to research and publish. It's certainly not to master AJAX web scripting techniques. Granted, Google's research is in more nebulous areas of unstructured datamining, information retrieval, algorithms, AI, OS & filesystem design, and maybe they won't develop the next general, purpose Unix or better materials for spaceship construction, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't do research. A brief list of their research areas are:
- algorithms
- artificial intelligence
- genetic algorithms
- machine learning
- natural language processing
- robotics
(From Papers by Googlers)You might say they're standing on the shoulders of the giants of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but in terms of computer science, show us someone who isn't. That doesn't mean Google's research could be any less important or ground breaking. And don't underestimate the value of the knowledge aggregation and improving language translation ability of their search engine. Who knows how this could affect human civilization, maybe even to the point of speeding up our advancement by connecting minds with more relevant information more quickly than the printing press, the worthless main stream media, and even P2P email allowed. Only time will tell...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Kernighan was my professor at Princeton and my advisor for my senior independent work here. I interviewed him for an anthropology paper in 2002 and he made it very clear that he did not create Unix and wasn't very involved in the creation process. The same goes for the C language, which is often attributed to him as well.
What Brian Kernighan DID do is write the book on Unix and C, literally. He co-wrote both books. (The Unix book is in Wayne's World 2.) He is also responsible for awk (a favorite tool of mine) and AMPL. He told me back then that he would go down to Bell on Fridays so he wasn't completely removed from the process.
A couple years ago when I was a senior I was at a recruiting event in the CS department and a couple guys from Bell Labs were there. They seemed really depressed about the state of everything, complaining about how the company no longer maintains the think tank for the purpose of increasing knowledge and all of their efforts were being focused towards creating phone switches. Needless to say that didn't peak the interest of any of the students in the room.
Doing what his wife wanted in the first place? Hardly.
How many hundreds of thousands of dollars does it take to pull the plug immediately, if that was really her wish?
Of course, the family had an interest in her welfare as well, but that does complicate the whole "GWB, Jeb, Frist, Focus.." story, eh?
If it really was her wish, he should have done it immediately, not after suing to get money for her rehabilitation and support, and before shacking up with another woman.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell