"THAT ABILITY TO TAKE THE LONG VIEW was a boon to Bell Labs researchers, who could follow their own instincts and explore what especially intrigued them, rather than what might bolster AT&T's bottom line during the next few years. "The only pressure at Bell Labs was to do work that was good enough to be published or patented," recalls Morris Tanenbaum, who developed the first silicon transistor in 1954 [see "The Lost History of the Transistor," IEEE Spectrum, May 2004]"
"WHEN THE AT&T MONOPOLY HELD SWAY over U.S. telecommunications, R&D managers at Bell Labs and Western Electric were assured steady funding that allowed them to look forward 10 or 20 years—the kind of long view that truly disruptive technologies need in order to germinate and thrive. That combination of stable funding and long-term thinking produced core contributions to a wide variety of fields, including wireless and optical communications, information and control theory, microelectronics, computer software, systems engineering, audio recording, and digital imaging. Accumulating more than 30 000 patents, Bell Labs also played host to a long string of scientific breakthroughs, garnering six Nobel Prizes in physics and many other awards.
The funding came in large part from what was essentially a built-in "R&D tax" on telephone service. Every time we picked up the phone to place a long-distance call half a century ago, a few pennies of every dollar—a dollar worth far more than it is today—went to Bell Labs and Western Electric, much of it for long-term R&D on telecommunications improvements.
In 1974, for example, Bell Labs spent over $500 million on nonmilitary R&D, or about 2 percent of AT&T's gross revenues. Western Electric spent even more on its internal engineering and development operations. Thus, more than 4 cents of every dollar received by AT&T that year went to R&D at Bell Labs and Western Electric."
Tipping my hat, Sir.
@HopelessDemigod @kc2ihx Now that's a perk that I like! Come to think of it the Holmdel #BellLabs location had a tower and huge beam for the #hamradio club to use BITD.
Visited Holmdel, NJ today. The former Bell Labs building is beautiful. #belllabs #bellworks
@itsfoss Nice article!
Bell Labs just turned 100 year old this year! 
https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokia-bell-labs-celebrates-100-years-of-innovation-and-looks-ahead-to-another-century-of-discovery/
This bit of computer history is absolute gold: https://web.archive.org/web/20250118102600/https://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.html #PJW #belllabs
What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? - It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand ... - https://hackaday.com/2024/10/17/what-would-it-take-to-recreate-bell-labs/ #belllabs #research #history
When I started this project, I had every intention of going through everyone else’s recommendations on The List as quickly as possible…until I realized just how huge a thing that is. I’ve now fallen into the pattern of not listening to the albums until its their turn for a spotlight, only making an exception if the Fediverse keeps putting one of them in front of my face, making me too curious to wait.
One such exception is this album, number 83 on The List. I decided to let The Expanding Universe jump the queue because one contributor in particular (and the person who submitted it to The List), avi_miller, not infrequently either kept mentioning it or including it in their 5×5 grid posts on Mastodon. And I’m very glad I did. This album does something to my brain, like scrubs it, or massages it, as if I can feel neurons firing all over, all in a good way. Philip Glass has a similar effect for me but more patterned and localized – this one is more free…expanding, I suppose. Anyway, I let Avi know I had taken a listen, and they whipped up the below thoughts for today’s spotlight. Enjoy!
In 1973, Laurie Spiegel started working at Bell Laboratories, a United States research center dedicated to the exploration of ground-breaking technologies. There, she would be given free-reign to experiment with some state of the art computers, the machines that would allow her to create the music that makes up her 1980 LP, The Expanding Universe.
The most important piece of technology behind the music on this album was GROOVE (Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment) System. Put simply, GROOVE System was a digital-analogue hybrid computer music system developed by Max Mathews, along with Lawrence Rosller, F. Richard Moore, and other colleagues from the late 1960s into the year 1970 at Bell Labs. The machine consisted of a wide variety of input and output devices, notably including 2 single megabyte hard disks which, to paraphrase Spiegel herself, were each roughly the size of a washing machine, all connected to a 24 bit DDP-224 computer in the next room over, visible through a window. (The actual computer was in a separate room from the inputs and outputs for the sake of temperature control.) This computer was then connected to a hefty amount of analog synthesizer equipment in a room down the hall. Digital signals from the computer room were sent to the analog room to control the equipment in there and then back to the computer room to be heard with speakers in real time in the input & output room.
Part of what made GROOVE System so revolutionary for the time was that it was a music making tool with a computer that was programmable both in DAP 24 and FORTRAN IV. The ability to write programs and algorithms that interacted with music being played by a musician in real time, all which could be recorded to digital memory, offered a layer of freedom to experiment with compositions that wasn’t available to most musicians in the early 1970s. Because of this aspect, Spiegel could more easily play with various elements of her pieces like the ambient textures of the title track, or the 4 rhythms that separately fluctuate across the 4 simultaneously playing melodies on Patchwork, each melody flowing in & out of view within the mix at various points.
Spiegel composed many pieces during her time at Bell Labs. 4 of those pieces, which date from 1974 to 1976, were released on the original 1980 release of the album via Philo (with another 15 that date from 1974 to 1977 being added for the 2012 reissue by Unseen Worlds).
If you are interested, it is well worth reading the liner notes from the re-release, which go into more detail behind the making of the album and the technology used [in the blog linked below].
https://1001otheralbums.com/2024/08/28/laurie-spiegel-the-expanding-universe-1980-us/
For decades, Bell Labs was considered not only the best industrial research lab in the world, but arguably the best research lab in the world, period. One Bell Lab alumnus described it as “a parallel organization to almost all the academic institutions put together.” Bell Labs not only developed new telephone equipment but performed novel scientific research, under the assumption that such research would ultimately result in improved communications technology.
Later this year #Nokia #BellLabs with #NASA will see to that the #moon will get's it's first 4G network, first station will be near the south pole.
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/24/tech/nokia-moon-4g-network-nasa-spc/index.html
@mattblaze @AbandonedAmerica the Murray Hill #BellLabs location is up for grabs now.
Bell Labs is Leaving the Building - If you ever had the occasion to visit Bell Labs at Murray Hill, New Jersey, or any... - https://hackaday.com/2024/01/22/bell-labs-is-leaving-the-building/ #currentevents #innovation #interest #belllabs #research #rants #news
I tell them stories about how when I started work at #bellLabs my boss was a #hamr and his boss was also a #HamRadio operator and so were many of my #coworkers. But that was a long time ago when there were many more #shortwave broadcasts and #cellphones were just becoming "a thing" and a #repeater with an #autopatch was "high tech" 
BITD at #belllabs there was an #EquipmentLibrary. If u needed a large power supply for a test u'd check to see they had one in the #Library b4 begging ur boss to buy one. What if we had a #HamRadioLibrary? What if you could borrow an #amateurradio instead of buy it? Would that be practical?
Retrotechtacular: The Computer Center of 1973 - You might expect Bell Labs would have state-of-the-art computers, and they did. Bu... - https://hackaday.com/2023/07/25/retrotechtacular-the-computer-center-of-1973/ #retrotechtacular #belllabs #ibm370 #ibm
Every day in the studio, I thank #BellLabs for balanced audio cables.
Now, if only *every* socket was a combi XLR/jack, that would save me a fuckton of hassle.
