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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."
From TFA:
"My take is that 1127 probably reached Schiavo status when Rob, Presotto, et al. fled west to Google.
That expression is a tad insensitive, don't you think?
Its a shame to see this department go, given the great contributions made by it to the state of modern operating systems. Of course Unix lives on in other forms, and its testament to the strength of the operating system that its free workalikes and variants have been as rampantly successful in developing and thriving. I can't help but wonder whether Plan 9 is affected at all by the demise..
Business Voyeur
Great job guys, your legacy shall be remembered. Hopefully, history will learn that creating barriers to knowledge only leads to trouble. I see FS/OSS as the future, but K&R shall be remebered.
Freedom is strength, Ignorance is peace, War is slavery.
Besides being totally tasteless (it was), the following quote does have the redeeming feature that it illustrates why you shouldn't be discouraged.
"My take is that 1127 probably reached Schiavo status when Rob, Presotto, et al. fled west to Google."
Although the unnamed employee goes on to say that it's a nail in the coffin of the "sort of research environment Bell Labs once represented," he neglects to mention that there is still tons of work that is being done in computing science-related research all over the nation and all over the world. Although it's fine to feel sentimental, let's not go over the top with saying that Google is the "last bastion" of anything. We see the demise of Bell Labs' Unix group as a big thing because it has a lot of history; now think how many tens or hundreds of places that someday will have a lot of history are out there right now; as yet unknown, but destined to be giants in the future.
It's tough to say goodbye to an old friend, but I'd never want to go back to the "good old days" that spawned those conditions.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Does the invention of the entire C programming language count?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It's a troll... but I just gotta bite.
A chair is ancient technology, but I'm happy to be sitting in one as I read slashdot today. Not all things are wrong just because they are old.
Blender And Linux Fan
I've had more good ideas from conversations on long coffee breaks than I care to remember. And they usually saved the company money, or fixed something. The ability to get away from a problem and take your mind productively in another direction has, for me, usually been a function of having talented and intelligent people around to share ideas with.
These days, if you're seen having a conversation of longer than two minutes you start to get the attention of management. Geeks aren't like everyone else, and they aren't motivated in the usual ways or by the usual things.
The effort now, seems to be to put armies of non-geeks at the keyboard, hoping that they can make up with numbers and procedures what they lack in talent. I just hope that this one doesn't turn out like The Celts vs. The Romans.
Hey! Maybe we should sacrifice a secretary to the god of system stability. Just be sure to start the fire with a printout of the last core dump.
Right. I mean Newton just invented calculus. Einstein really pushed it forward and did things with it. Not to knock Newton, since calculus is a really big deal. And his work with harmonic motion was great.
But the stuff you really think about and use, like time dialation, that was all Einstein. And Newtonion Mechanics is hardly state of the art.
Einstein, Heisenberg, and others must have looked back and thought; "What did you really contribute, Newton? You didn't even have the concept of light having a finite speed."
No one ever stood on the shoulders of giant before, right?
Oh shit! Calculus has roots going back like a few millenium (Ancient Egyptians), we better get rid of that stuff quickly! Let's move on, kids.
Regards,
Steve
Anyway, in my arguments to encourage research into trying new ways of doing things, I always used Bell Labs as my favorite example/reason why we should.
That's okay, you just need to change what Bell Labs is an example of. I mean really, what has Bell Labs produced recently? Some very impressive stuff if you actually look at some of what has managed to trickle it's way out. Things like Plan9 and Inferno are actually very impressive indeed in terms of the core ideas (that is, the part the research division is responsible for). Had a little more money been thrown into really building something out of those they could have been huge. So really Bell Labs is an example of what happens when management stops paying attention to, and having faith in, their research department.
Want another example. How about Microsoft research? They have some very good people there, Tony Hoare and Leslie Lamport to name just two off the top of my head. If you dig around through some of the stuff they are working on there's some amazing ideas there. How much of that is actually seeing the light of day and making it into product? Very very little.
The reason Google seems so good is not because they have more good people doing research - in practice they probably don't. It's because management spends more time listening to and working with the research teams to see that those ideas actually get used.
The death of Bell Labs is just another example of what happens when the research department gets ignored. And yes, I am a bit bitter, having worked in a research department that regularly got ignored.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
What good does all their research do if it's going to end up in half-assed implementations and closed to the world so we cannot benefit from it?
We still have the universities, and IBM still has a sizable research division. But the exclusive focus by most of today's companies on the next quarter's revenue means we're eating the seed corn.
Now I can pull a used PC out of the trash and create the world's best software with virtually no investment other than my time.
Uh uh! Not so fast. We have software patents to stop any such subversive activity!
An important thread to note here is that none other than Carly Fiorina is the one of the principals in spinning off Lucent and Bell Labs from AT&T. She looked like a superstar for it though in fact Lucent was mostly just a beneficiary of being a telecom/networking company during the bubble when none could fail. Their stock history is interesting from a peak around $80 in 2000 to $2.88 today. Carly's time in the sun at Lucent was from the spinoff in 1996 until she jumped to HP in 1999. Here is a glowing Businessweek article on her when she took the helm at HP then. One interesting quote:
"she helped to turbocharge product development by the long-coddled Bell Labs engineers."
A guy told me once on an airplane beware any company or person who makes the cover of Businessweek because it usually means they've peaked and are starting down. He said it in context of SGI and its a rule that worked just as well for Carly.
Hindsight being 20/20 you have to wonder if Carly didn't get lucky at Lucent thanks to the bubble and she was made to look like a superstar when in fact she was a one women wrecking ball for research and development at both Lucent/Bell Labs and HP and its labs.
Another Carly theme at Bell Labs, if you go to their web site today they are a case study in out sourcing with their greatest achievement today looking to be the fact that they have labs in China, India and Ireland.
@de_machina
I don't know if you're aware of this? But companies make money licensing patents too. Just ask IBM.
Engineering is called "applied science". Research is called "pure science". Pure science is always the basis for applied science. It's hard to make a transistor if you don't know what the hell an electron is and how it acts.
I don't respond to AC's.