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AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs - R&D History
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has a piece looking at the history of corporate R&D, in response to an article on the BusinessWeek site essentially calling the telecommunication giants aging fossils of communication. The Ars piece looks as several innovations to come out of the AT&T Labs over the years, as well as the era of innovation brought on by the Cold War." From the article: "The Cold War, with its 'Pentagon socialism', combined with large corporate monopolies that were expected to provide lifetime employment and pensions, made for something of a golden age for American technological innovation. This is the era that brought us the transistor and the predecessor to the Internet, an era where all the seeds of today's 'information economy' were sown and carefully cultivated at great private and public expense. The great labs of this era--Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM's labs--were places with massive budgets, where the world's top scientists were invited to pursue "blue sky" research into areas with no immediately apparent commercial applications. The facilities were state-of-the-art, and there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake."
We used to call it Bell Labs. Getting a job there was like the ultimate geek cred.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No we don't. Patent trolls BUY patents, or patent OBVIOUS things, and then use them as weapons for extortion. Bell Labs and PARC invented real technologies. I'm not saying that they didn't do their share of patenting stupid shit, but they did real research, and their parent companies/divisions actually deployed much of their technology in the real world, not just as a licensor.
I remember Alan Kay saying that Xerox wasn't easy on Xerox PARC. It was PARC's directors that shielded the researchers from the corporate pressure and gave them the time and space to do their work. Not Xerox'. So I don't think these historical companies had a grand vision of research. They had good research directors. Note also that some well known projects survived because they were kept below the management's radar and caught on outside the research lab. Both UNIX at ATT and HTML/HTTP at CERN took off partly because the management didn't care much about them.
This is an interesting notion. But how can you compare? The curriculum that students have access to these days is far and away better. Access to Advanced Placement classes is increasing. Case in point is the Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Education Consortium WAPDEC. The expectations may not be there from teachers, but the individual drive of the "elite" students should make up for that. The access of current students to technology is much greater today (I believe). These elite students have always been outside of pop culture thus that has no effect on them.
When you are talking about Bell Labs of yester-year, you are talking about some Nobel Laureates. Can you even compare genuis of that level? So... if you think the "go-getters" that made it to the top Labs, such as Bell, back then are your Average Joe that attends public school, you are wrong.