In this short video I revisit my first place of employment post undergrad – Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ.
The impact divestiture of the Bell System had long-term, on technology research, 27 years after the fact.
On the evening before Henry Blodget’s “Startup 09″ conference in NYC, Steve Bell of StartupTrek revisits the idle Bell Telephone Laboratories research facility 45 miles south in Holmdel, NJ 32 years after his first day at what turned out to be an 8 year job stint (his record!). He reflects on the projects he was fortunate to have worked on there (Dec 1977-April 1986), and some of the impact divestiture of the Bell System had on the world of technology and the US’ national interest. This video report from Steve’s side-trip from NYC to Holmdel runs just short of 4 minutes:
The three-legged tower behind Steve in this video is sometimes referred to as “the world’s biggest transistor”, with each of the three legs representing the emitter, base, and collector of a bipolar discrete transistor. Here is an excellent story on the tower, the building, and the heritage at RoadSideAmerica.com:
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/8180
The impact of the work of Bell Labs’ Engeineers and Researchers (funded with Billions of dollars per year from the Bell Telephone System’s regulated monopoly) as a catalyst to today’s technological revolution has yet to be measured. The decision to break up the Bell System which effectively ended this nation subsidy, will have to be judged by history. The impact on the next centurey of scientific and technological research in the US is likely to be immense.
When “Ma Bell” was taken apart by the lawyers and Judge Green in 1982, we were told that it all had to be done in order to foster a new era of technology innovation, a revolution. What we got was Bernie Ebbers and MCI (Bernie now sets in a Federal Prison, as a result of committing the biggest financial fraud in US hisotry at the time), and cellular calls which you can hardly understand. Mas bell has been re-incarnated, but it is called Verizon; and AT&T isn’t really AT&T, it is really a bunch of acquired carriers with a very weak 3G network, which is advertised as “America’s fastest 3G network” (while in reality, it is America’s WORST 3G network).
My observation here is that the end of the Bell System in 1982, also marked the slow slide of the end of a certain era of business ethics in America, all in the name of “free markets”. And we are paying the piper now.
Just a SMALL SAMPLING of the many technologies and inventions created by Bell Laboratories (modern business telephones include:
- aka the “2500 set” and the “4A” speakerphone;
- the global switched PSTN telephone network;
- the “System 85 PBX” (the first large-scale modern PBX with digital Codecs in the CPE);
- fiber optics, a key technology underlying the internet and broadband, along with packet switching;
- the transistor which underlies modern VLSI technology;
- basic science including Arno Penzias and associates decoding the “big bang”;
- cellular telephony (“the AMPS project”),
- the modern telephone/speakerphone/videophone,
- the digital PBX,
- ISDN (Integrated Switched Digital Network, the first digital telephony “last mile” access technology),
- echo cancellers,
- many innovative and pioneering 32 and 64-bit CPU and DSP architectures,
- the UNIX operating system which led to today’s Linux revolution (thank you!),
- many digital, analog, and mixed-signal VLSI design techniques including switched capacitor filtering,
- and scores of other foundations of our current technology boom).
RIP, Bell Labs.
