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."

Comments

Let's us not forget

[stox]

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.

Re:Let's us not forget

[stox]

Lee died in 1989. Although still way too young, he had probably made most of his major achievments and his children were adults. Joe, on the other hand, died in a tragic accident in 1977, just as he was really hitting his stride. I don't know if he had any children. Had Joe lived, I suspect that troff would have ruled the world, or a direct decendant. Sadly, after Joe died, development of troff pretty much froze solid. Every memo and publication I have ever read from Joe Ossanna indicated, to me at least, that he would have been a true giant in the computing community.

not an AT&T department

[anothy]

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.

Re:we've still got Google, for now

[CondeZer0]

First of all, Linux is just an Unix clone, and it never had many fans at Bell Labs.

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:

• Why Plan 9 is not dead yet And What we can learn from it by Ron Minnich from the Advanced Computing Lab, Los Alamos National Lab.
  
• The Ubiquitous File Server in Plan 9 by Dr. C. H. Forsyth of Vitanuova
  

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.)

Re:we've still got Google, for now

[Anonymous Coward]

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

What is Salus talking about?

[Marc Rochkind]

I was at Bell Labs from 1970 to 1982, and I don't remember any Dept. 1127. My 1980 Bell Labs Directory shows a Dept. 1271, led by McIlroy, consisting of Cherry, Morris, Thompson, Aho, Baker, Lengaauer, Syzmanski, Weinberger, and Yannakakis. Its sibling, Dept. 1273, led by Fraser, consisted of Chesson, Kernighan, Ritchie, Stroustrup, Vollaro, Johnson, Ditzel, Elliott, and Feldman. (No Pike--I don't think he was at Bell Labs yet.)

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.

Re:What is Salus talking about?

[td]

Confirmed -- I worked in 1127 from 1984 to 1996. Bell Labs department numbers were path labels in the org chart. I was in Area 11 (Research, as opposed to one of the many development areas), Division 112 (Information Sciences), Center 1127 (Computing Science Research), Department 11273 (which had some meaningless name that I forget -- Computing Structures Research or Computing Techniques Research or something. Departments in Center 1127 were mostly not organized thematically, but were a convenience to spread the management load around -- for example, Ken & Dennis were in different departments.) Sometime in the early '80s, before I arrived, all the Area names grew an extra digit, presumably because some organizational change made there be more than 9 subtrees at that level.

Re:we've still got Google, for now

[fbg111]

Google doesn't do any research. What does google do?

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...