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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."
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?
"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
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
dude, they wrote UNIX. Buy a clue (or some Ritchie/Kernighan editions) and get back to installing your nightly windoze patches.
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
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. "
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
A few things come to mind
1) Making the command interpreter a user level process instead of an integral part of the kernel.
2) Treating all files as simple streams of data. Mainframes of the day that I've had experience with all forced some type of record format on files.
3) Making everything visible to the sytem as a file(file systems, devices, message queues). On other systems these are handled via special reserved words understood by the command interpreter or system.
4) Pipes between processes.
5) The C programming language itself.
Much of this seems like common sense today, but they were new ideas around 1970. Some of them were probably taken from other research operating sytems of the time and reimplemented as software patents were'nt the problem they are today.
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
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.
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
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.
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
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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.
You see, to me, mindless applications of fourier transforms and other mathematical techniques describes engineering, whereas coming up with new ideas and algorithms describes research.
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.
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.
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.