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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."
Slaytanic is gae fr1st post. 3 this week, w00t!
I think this is sad, and a little ominous. I worked at a telco years ago, and managed to fanagle a chat on the phone with Ritchie one time when a Bell worker was on site for some software installations. Cool.
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. Guess I won't have that anymore. Sigh.
What I fear most is the lack of research for research's sake. A lot of things we use today are a direct or indirect result of companies allowing a certain amount of "what if" thinking and activity to go on. Even better, some companies, like Bell Labs actually allocated specifically for that.
I don't think research in commercial context is really research at all and may even be counterproductive in creating new and better technology (if commercial research into products were for "quality", would there even be a Britney Spears?).
The last bastion I know of and trust is Google. They seem to be dedicated to the cause. But, they're young, they're new, and they haven't had to deal with stockholders in bad times yet.
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?
fuck ya
"The article provides an interesting "where are they now?" list of the original authors of Unix."
They've joined Linco. Developing cutting-edge technology to put into a commodity OS. With Linus as Director.
What is cooking at Department # 1337.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
"Goodbye Dep. 1127 and thank you for all the code"
:)
Thank you 1127
Just opened 'the C programming language' to reference something. Nuf said...
TFA means REAL ULTIMATE POWER status right?
Get your Unix fortune now!
they didn't want to say that it's as dead as *BSD... /rimshot
Get your Unix fortune now!
Anyone have any concrete examples of research that was done at Bell that went into UNIX as a system?
Moderation -1
100% Overrated
This is how dissent is treated on Slashdot. No discussion, just punishment.
Who was it insensitive to?
I don't respond to AC's.
I worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill from 1985 through 1989, and though I did not work in Dept 1127, I did get the amazing chance to see what Bell Labs was all about: the incredible, vibrant home to tremendously talented scientists from the UNIX gurus to the low temperature physics gods. As a young high school and then college student, aspiring to join their ranks full time, I was mesmerized by the environment where a 2pm coffee break could evolve into a deep discussion of networking theory and then reflect sincerely on the goings-on in the world. Bell Labs was a magical place, and hopefully, the seeds of similar pure research incubators are being sewn in today's tech powerhouses such as Google.
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
I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman when I interviewed with Mathworks a couple of years ago. I was taken aback by his humility, and the poor guy was embarrassed when I requested his autograph :) He has a former license plate in his office that reads "YACCMAN".
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This post has been unfairly modded. Please, brother, can you spare a point for zardo? Even an 'Underrated' will do.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
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. "
Avast, we knew ye well! ARRRrrrggghhh...
Well, at least as well as the product you developed, maintained, improved, and sent off to blossom into what it is today.
"Thanks for all the fish!" indeed!
As Bob Metcalfe noted recently, *nix is 60's technology. Let's move on, kids.
SiO2
What were the contributions of the AT&T guys to Unix? I thought it was the BSD guys who pushed it forward. I don't mean to attack AT&T. The initial creation of Unix and the other stuff they've done over the years has been great.
But when it comes to the stuff that gets used, I have a hard time remembering anything that came out of AT&T that I use. Now I would guess the NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD people are the ones doing state-of-the-art stuff, with Unix.
Similarly, the BSD people must have had the same reaction, when they looked at the kernel, realised there were about 6 original AT&T files --- and you know the rest of the story.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
If Bell can fall, then this event only proves that Google will someday fall. It is all just a great progression of humanity. And hopefully before that fall a little more technology will come to push mankind farther. Good job Department 1127!
I mean, there's something to be said for learning data structures and operating systems from a guy who helped invent the idea of pipes.
McIlroy's homepage.
Don't you kno *NIX has been dieing for years :)
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.
But when it comes to the stuff that gets used, I have a hard time remembering anything that came out of AT&T that I use.
C perhaps?
Although IBM http://www.research.ibm.com/ may be out of the disk drive business, they are still working on it. Take a look at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ still going strong after all these years.
It seems like they would have a hard time attracting the talent to keep the group open. My dad, an 18 year Bell Labs veteran, left Telcordia /Bellcore/Bell Labs five years ago. The downturn in the tech industry forced many others to leave for more lucrative jobs while they were still available. Two of the math/CS teachers at my old high school were from Bell, for instance.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
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?
Speaking of which, what happened to Axel Rose? Does anyone know?
My brother was a Guns'n'Roses fan - well he always said they only had one and a half albums that were any good.
Anyway, what's Axel Rose doing now? Does he read slashdot?! Hi Ax!
Considering all the damage that C/C++ has done. I wouldn't be bragging on that.
Bell Labs is part of Lucent, not AT&T. The article is about the demise of a Lucent department.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Look for the pencils, pens and desk and chances are you will find the people still there. I wish people who wrote stories here got carded first ! How many times has the Unix lab already folded in the past ? Perhaps if you knew history you would better understand the present. I know they are still around and they are working on DOD. Just so you think economics matters they pretend to go dormant.
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.
Bell Labs was once part of a honest-to-goodness MONOPOLY. This is why they had time to go in for multi-hour jawbone sessions. Google has at least three competitors ready to kick it in the groin should it rest to navel gaze for two seconds.
Wow, the only thing I can think of as a response is:
Et tu, brute?
Coderz 4 Life
Come to think of it, how much of their research dept is just researching current trends from competitors and racing to the USPTO to file a patent before the actual inventor can?
I choose not to like it...
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
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?
Too bad their contributions to society can be measured in terms of:
Clippy
Wizards
Exploits
GUI inconsistencies
Flight simulators
BASIC
GPL Deconstructed
It's not over yet!
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet!
Didn't AT&T sell Unix to Novell back in 1993? What have these guys been working on since then?
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 . . . .
Right. But I can actually spell Newton, so he gets the credit.
This is off topic but I feel like complaining.
Rob Pike and Dave Presotto and Sean Dorward are at Google
What the fuck is going on here? So it is not just the Slashdot editors. I guess any IT related journalist has no grammar skills.
Regular expressions (everywhere)?
The bourne shell?
Plug-in device drivers?
Hierarchical (tree) directory structures?
Devices as operating system files?
Mountable file systems?
Command line pipes and redirection?
A portable OS?
SUID/SGID?
awk, sed, grep, lex, yacc and make?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Clippy
Wizards
Those are finished products. Mostly bad ones, to be sure, but products nonetheless. Microsoft Research does research. Top quality research, too (in my field anyway).
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).
Dude, you fell for one of the oldest trolls out there, and you have lower slashdot number than me. Stephen King is not dead. The media would be all over it if it were to be true.
zosxavius photography
ATT was a full-on MONOPOLY. this is what funded all this navel gazing. you hear about how great unix is, but very little about how prices for long distance calling pre-1984 were absurd.
Schiavo Status - Something kept technically alive far past the point of its practical death.
Getting Schiavoed- Someone whos job has been eliminated for practical purposes but is kept on the payroll in a meaningless position.
If you don't do physics as research you are not doing real research. Period.
Just wondering if you can name anything thats come out of Microsoft Research that qualifies as revolutionary or groundbreaking? Spending money on research and collecting big names like Akeley and Blinn, for example, in their graphic department doesn't mean they're producing anything that will have lasting impact, like Unix and C did. Microsoft reputation, which they have a hard time shaking no matter how many billions they spend on research is all the groundbreaking stuff happens elsewhere, they just embrace, extend and exploit, as in the case of the Internet are often rather late to the dance.
Two big splashes Microsoft made in graphics, I can recall, are Talisman and Fahrenheit, both long dead. I see Cleartype in their list which is nice but not sure they actually invented it nor that its exactly ground breaking. I see video textures described as a "new medium" on their list, like its something revolutionary, when in fact SGI was doing those more than a decade ago.
They were certainly prolific in papers at SIGGRAPH 2005, though its hard to gage SIGGRAPH papers for how big the real impact of the research will be. In the mid 90's Talisman Microsoft's next generation graphics architecture, completely dominated attention at a SIGGRAPH only to die soon thereafter while all the real action was at 3Dlabs, Nvidia and ATI. Its also a bit disturbing when you see the lions share of their current graphics research is coming out of that bastion of democracy and free enterprise, the People's Republic of China.
@de_machina
The subject line says it all ...
UNIX must be one of the, if not "the", most important OS ever released to the public.
Windows is now trying to add (even more) UNIX-like features and functions in to it. Apple has embraced it 100%. Linux is now huge & running on every kind of device, from the PDA to the traditional heavy metal. I wonder what is next? Wow.
Cheers, gent's, cheers.
Have a couple of fingers of scotch in a lowball & relax.
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.
"Top quality research, too (in my field anyway)."
What field is that. I actually want to look at what one of their divisions that is known for doing world class stuff of the caliber of the old Bell Labs, PARC, etc. And if you don't mind me asking how can you come to the conclusion its top quality? Is it because they churn out large numbers of semi impressive papers for the premier conference in your field, SIGGRAPH in graphics for instance.
My jaundiced view of research papers is that yes some of them are ground breaking, revolutionary and the foundation for greater things. Many of them unfortunately are the product of someone desperate to produce a paper, and get it accepted at a conference to make a name for themselves. Microsoft's research presence at SIGGRAPH for the last decade, for example, feels more like they are spending vast sums, more than anyone else, to flood the conference with their papers, in order to impress everyone with their research prowess while the real breakthroughs happen elsewhere, and they rip them off and put them in DirectX.
I think I'm saying that I'm more impressed with people who produce groundbreaking things that end up making a difference in the world, and write papers about it kind of after the fact. As opposed to people who are producing impressive research for research's sake, building a resume, and aren't focused on producing something that will eventually make a real difference in the world.
@de_machina
By saying "Newtonian Mechanics" is hardly state of the art you're missing the point.
While relativity and quantum physics are at odds with one another (everyone from Einstein to Stephen Hawking have been working on a unified theory without a whole lot of luck (string theory is promising)), Newton's theory ultimately managed to unify cosmic and terrestrial forces as were observable in his time period. To this day, the Newtonian physics model is still valid in many disciplines and is still used.
Rather than knocking Newton/Leibnitz's calculus and comparing this to Unix, perhaps Unix is more like Newtonian physics: it's not complete nor perfect, but it's darn useful.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
HP Cambridge Research Labs has also been disbanded, as seen in a recent blog post by Jim Gettys: http://www.gettysfamily.org/wordpress/
So much for Darl's open letter!
(before you mod me troll, back off of the mouse, and try to see the humor in the above comment!)
bash: rtfm: command not found
I don't know if you're aware of this? But companies make money licensing patents too. Just ask IBM.
Dude, where's my Unix!
If exposure to C++ hasn't destroyed your ability to think logically, you should have no trouble with math. Leslie Lampo
I was never in 1127 (I was a 9212 down at Holmdel), but seeing 1127 finally die is sad.
:o)
It is indeed a reflection of the Labs' culture and research environment vanishing, never to return...
It was a great environment, and we made some great things there.
--
Take care,
Tomas
Nothing innovative or even particularly interesting there.
Your nation has been 0wned by the French again, ha ha so sad. Losers.
"...and then reflect sincerely on the goings-on in the world"
Haha, much like RMS who thinks Naomi Klein is relevant? That's truly magical
Evidence is showing Archimedes either about thought up calculus already, or already did, but was too busy jumping out of tubs and then later getting killed by a Roman soldier. So 2000 years before Newton, and not really able to tell other people about it.
At Google this great ability to turn research into product is entirely because all the management have degrees/masters in comuter science/technology/engineering and are in touch with the company's work.
The commercial part of UNIX was sold back then, but the internally used UNIX based systems that worked in the background of the majority of the US phone system (and kept most of the records and even switched some of your calls) were still kept in the family.
I'm sure there was, and still is, enough work to do on those major supports of what WAS the Bell System...
No. If I have been able to see further, it is because I am surrounded by midgets.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Working at an unamed Gov agency..I've had the opportunity to talk with some former members who worked there. There are many in the computer science community who are concerned over the lack of any real progress in OS research and design.
There seems to be this mentality that research into OS kernels and low level operating design is over. That everything has been discovered.
Without organizations like what Bell Labs used to be it makes getting decent OS research done even harder.
"To the best of my knowledge, Dennis Ritchie and Howard Trickey remain, enisled." Do you suppose the author was going for 'enlisted' or actually meant to use 'enisled', which is indeed a word, and possibly an apt, if not a little prosaic, one.
Terminate and stay resinous.
I am good with that.
Yes, I wish someone would tell me how to spell Leibniz.
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.
Just because you don't hear about it (AT&T UNIX), doesn't mean it's not being used. AT&T UNIX ---> (Lucent) is still powering every Lucent 5ESS uses it to process your telephone calls. It is still being constantly developed to add more features to their switching products
They're most like AT&T was in it's heyday. You may not like their business for other reasons, but they are doing a lot of research now.
Sure, it's just like it sounds. L-E-E-B-?-?-IZ. ...
...
Say, why don't you look it up like everyone else.
And while you're at it go play in traffic, and get off my damned lawn!
The above post is moderated 20% "offtopic" shows that the mod system is broke. "Offtopic"? Come on!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yes, lots of people have left, and some/many of those that remain are pretty depressed. Some feel that the research environment is, or will soon be, dead.
:-)
But what actually happened was a reorg. We got a new head honcho. As another commenter posted, the problem with Bell Labs (and research in general) is not coming up with good ideas, but rather making those good ideas have an effect on the business. The purpose of the reorg was to allow research to continue, but to also provide a path for some projects to more easily make it to the business units.
The new organization actually seems like it might not be so bad. It's possible that there will be a spectrum of work, from basic research at one end, to an almost start-up environment (of course with a big sugar daddy) at the other end.
Yes, things are changing, and there won't be an org code "1127" anymore, but geez, lighten up! Can't anyone else be overly optimistic like me?
Read some posts about waning research in computers, my perception is its just been moved to other countries Netherlands, Germany , France, India, China. Rather sad to see the importance of research as a means to stay ahead of the pack has been lost in US, especially when billions of dollars are piped into football and other sports.. tsk tsk. Not Good.
From talking to ex-AT&T engineers, Bell labs was not run well in the last few years and bordered on dysfunctional. They now brought in some new guy, Jong Kim, who is shaking things up. Maybe we'll see some real tech out of that place again.
It seems the former management no longer understood bell labs creativity and actually made the environment impossible for some of their best engineers and scientists. It would not suprise me if seriously valuable coders like Rob Pike and Dave Presotto were no longer valued and were made to do corporate bs or clean the toilets by some bean counting bozos.
Bell labs is dead, long live Bell labs
Does this mean Mr. Kernighan is out of job?
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/
"I'm a slave of Karma, Spin the Wheel and I'm a king reborn."
I hate the phone company. They added a $2/mo charge for my long distances, which I never use!
she collapsed in 1990. She has been on tubes and heavy care since that time. A quick guess is that it was taking somewhere on the order of 100-200K/year for the medical care that she was receiving. In addition,this trial probably cost schiavo no less than 100K and probably closer to 200K (legal cases like this are NOT cheap). There is no doubt in my mind that the money from this settlement ran out long ago. Probably in 1997.
Now lets explore the situation. He probably filed that law suit in 1991 after the insurance company tried to back out of paying. It took several years to get the payments that he needed. In addition, he probably wanted to give his wife several years to make sure that she really was a vegitable. Even though the true medical community said she was, he saw reasons to think otherwise. So after 5 years, he felt it was time to declare it over.
You, and these neo-cons seem to think that he is a scum bucket. Ok, say he is. If so, then why do you think that he cares if he is married to this other women? More and more, ppl are electing to ignore the convention of marriage. There is really very little social stigma associated with living together or having children out of wedlock. The money has run out. While terry could not sign for a divorce, it would have been a simple hearing that would have allowed the courts to declare her incompetent, allow the divorce, and then allow her parents to take control. Yet, Schaivo did not do this. In addition, if he was the scum bucket that the neo-cons portray, they would have shown proof of his spending the settlement money on himself. I have no doubt that the neo-cons have gone through his bank account even though it is illegal.
Quite honestly, the man did every thing aboveboard, and it is plainly obvious to any logical person that schaivo is not what the neo-cons/fox news/etc. try to portray him as. I would love to see schaivo sue the pants from each and every one of the neo-cons connected with libeling him.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This has made a lot of people very happy and been widely regarded as a good move.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I have not in the decade since read a technical book that was as concise, relevant, readable and useful as the K&R C book. Stuff like that which lowers the barriers to entry to learning a technology goes a long way to making a platform popular and useful. It's totally fair to say he didn't code much or any of UNIX, but as a member of that team, I still give him mad props for being essentially the "Edward Tufte" of C/UNIX.
We each have our own gifts. While I'm sure he benefitted from the serendipity of being a part of Bell Labs at that time, I think the Labs also benefitted from the serendipity of having him.
--LP