The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs - Computerphile 

Ryan N Socialism :)

Bennett Piater Not necessarily socialism, but centralising research would reduce the amount of redundant work done and the ability to cooperate between different researchers so much that things would speed up dramatically.

Bennett Piater More like a free market system: few regulations, independent thought, and positive competition; especially since it was all funded by a very large corporation :-)

Dustin Speckhals Well, a large corporation that happened to have a monopoly in the industry they were competing in, so they didn't have to worry too much about how actually producing a product that had had to compete with other companies. So "free", but not traditionally considered a well-behaving market.

Love it! "transistors, just something that comes to mind."

I can honestly say I'm not because I've crafted my career working only for places i think are stimulating environment!

You are right

i feel like universal basic income would recreate such an atmosphere. i wonder how much innovation we'd see in that case, looking at all the stuff happening at bell labs at that time.

guess what the vast majority of people did with COVID checks: sleep in and watch Netflix. so much for the aspiring artists and creators

@@miyalys LOL, Yes yu wil eat ze bugs

Any stories? do you remember talking to him back then?

TazeTSchnitzel I was actually wondering if the book was placed there deliberately.

TheByteGuru Nah, he always has it there in his office. If they panned the camera around you'd see that there's actually quite a few things in there that he's worked on over the past 50ish years

+TazeTSchnitzel When I find my code in tonnes of trouble friends and colleges come to me speaking words of wisdom "Write in C" RIP Ritchie

Andreas Kristoffersen Love it! And part of the "in crowd" joke is that it has to be sung to "Let It Be" which is itself written in the key of -- wait for it! -- C major ? . However in line 2 we do need to do: s/colleges/colleagues/ ?

+ProfDaveB Yea, we definitely need that substitution, sorry, must've been really tired when I wrote it :)

Thanks for that term, didn't know about that. I'm wondering if we'd see the same if Universal Basic Income was implemented nation wide, instead of such a policy company wide. Maybe combined with much more open source and open hardware.

That's really interesting, thank you!

Nikolaj Lepka To top it of, he (Brian) co-authored the said book.

Straight from the horses mouth and does it ever get right down to the guts of the C, but not recommended for the timid.

Lots of scrolling mouse wheels on news websites and documentation... open plan office battery farm.

The learning of computers how everything changes your world

Desmaad Certainly, I would say timesharing and cooperative multitasking are synonyms. Parallel multitasking is another beast however.

Desmaad Well in fact it is quite exactly the technique modern operating systems use to do multitasking: The scheduler of the OS gives every thread a time slot for its instructions based on its priority.

Desmaad check out Erlang, (and its creation).

Calle Silver-Granhall Quite not at all. Timesharing was not cooperative multitasking, it was preemptive multitasking. The OS was in total control of how much time you got and how long you got it for. If your program did not cooperate the OS was completely able to shut it down. There was no other way to manage 100+ users all sharing the same resource, especially when a large number of those users were trying to measure how fast the machine was by running CPU benchmarks ("Oh, gee, a Ferrari, how fast does it go?")

ib9rt Ok, thanks for clarifying. I had misunderstood the "cooperative" term in that case. I understood it as "yielding processes" not whether they did it themselves or the scheduler forced it (I assumed the latter).

DaSauceful Where you work ? :)

university researcher

Oh awesome, it must me a great environment

DaSauceful If you enjoy that freedom, and you are comfortable with the pay, you may want to consider freelancing, perhaps after a graduate degree and a bit more experience in the area you wish to freelance. If possible, and there's the interest, use the freelance earnings to fund your own curiosities. The world may be amazed by what you develop.

That's sort of the plan. I'm a project based learner which makes me pretty well rounded. I like the idea of being a project manager for hire or a an "mercenary innovator". Idk if there is a term for that. only problem is money.

I also love computerphile

It does, all the time, countless researchers are paid from public funds to produce thousands of meaningless research papers nobody ever reads. Bell Labs was an anomaly in that it happened to be at the epicenter of computing when it all kicked off and so its researchers were in prime position to innovate repeatedly in that new space. Bell Labs hasn't produced anything worth mentioning in many years since, because it's no longer as easy to innovate in this space anymore, it's nothing special about how Bell Labs worked, it's just the time and place they were at aligned. Nowadays you got many "Bell Labs" out there, Microsoft has one, Google has one, Facebook has one, etc. Just very few of them produce groundbreaking tech because it's not as easy to do that with a field that is established and highly standardized vs one that is new. Not to say you CAN'T innovate in computer science, but it's not as easy as it was for people at Bell Labs, the same way it's not as easy to produce groundbreaking physics as it was in Newton's era, you know? There comes a point where most questions have been answered and even coming up with new questions is challenging, figuring out the answers can sometimes be the easier part

@@liquidsnake6879 no. It fund research. Yes. But it isn’t PURE research. They have to bid, apply for funding, go through rounds of hearings, stacks of application papers etc etc. pure research like at bell labs was - you’re employed to research anything you want, whatever, when ever, with whomever. Not even the corps you mention do pure research. I am not just in about computer science.

I totally agree! I didn't even know who he was until after I watched the video -- I happened to glance through the description and saw his name. Then I realized, "Oh! He's the co-author with Dennis Ritchie of that 'C' book from which I learned the language back in college!" I saw the book on the shelf in the background, of course, and I knew of Dennis Ritchie's connection to that book, but it just didn't occur to me that I was watching the other half of Kernighan and Ritchie!

These videos are pretty much for people who have some education on computers. You don't expect a common person to understand what ARM or RISC or even what binary means.

Is this a joke? lol

Amen to that

So long as someone is willing to pay for it, the only reason it was possible was again because AT&T had a monopoly and guaranteed money, so dumping some millions of it into R&D which may not return anything for years wasn't a big problem for them. But other than state-sponsored universities i can't think of any other modern environment where such a thing is possible. You cannot ask people for money with nothing in return usually unless you're the government

These things don't really work like that. you gotta be a little bit of an obsessed maniac

@@ua2894 That's crazy talk. Is there nothing in your life that you like doing? Well, researching is just something people love doing. It's not for no reason that millions of people choose academia as their field of work

***** Er .... no. Nothing state-side here. Sean and I interviewed Brian here in the School of Computer Science, Univ. of Nottingham. Brian was on a day visit (he is one of our Honorary Professors). I live in hopes that one day Computerphile may also be able to feature something from Don Knuth (Brady already has him on Numberphile)

I don't know if you're aware but he's the guy who named UNIX

I love C. It made me come to life // Tux

I'm 28 and I feel like older than him, which is miserable.

***** Well spotted that it was the original edition ! Yes -- that's my personal copy (now signed) . There are a couple of "UNIX Special Editions" of the Bell Systems Technical Journal on the shelf as well.

ProfDaveB Congratulations on seeing the 202 memo recovered, I printed it out on a mighty fancy digital typesetting machine and was very satisfied with the output. I didn't know that things this beautiful could come out of troff. It is nice to see that some bits aren't just left to rot.

***** Well, all of Brian's books have been typeset with troff. The problem is that you really do need the device-independent version, that he created with the Linotronic 202 in mind, to get good quality output. Sadly AT&T decided in the early '80s, that ditroff would *not* be bundled with the standard UNIX distribution. It was a $4000 (I think) add-on extra. Faced with that kind of outlay, it's small wonder that academics went with TEX, which was free. Quite a bit later groff came along, which Brian actually uses .....

TeX is pure magick, especially with the macros people have these days, it maybe would've won anyway.

Sounds like a Sudbury school

linkviii that's a large part of why BSD/berkeley unix was so popular!

linkviii There was a folklore tale doing the rounds,many years ago, that someone (Dennis Ritchie ??) had been challenged in an interview, to the effect that "UNIX isn't user friendly". To which the reply came back: "It wasn't designed to be user-friendly; it was designed to be programmer-friendly" . Which, for me, just about sums it all up.

What is called AT&T now, is really Southwestern Bell, who acquired the assets of the post-1984 divestiture of the Bell System. That AT&T ran the long distance network and tried to go into various businesses like selling computers. It didn't work.

Google is nothing like BTL. BTL was civilized. Today's software companies are NOT. Plus, AT&T was run by smart people who were well ground in reality. Another things that software companies do not have.

Yes, in a way. I wrote my first research paper with large numerical component done on punch card. It took 1/2 year to produce the paper. It takes almost the same if not longer for current grand students, despite all the technology

Early 1980's. Reagan, not Nixon. Fast forward to today. Even if nothing happened back then, Bell Labs would have still faded away.