Re: [TUHS] Stories

Re: [TUHS] Stories

[Doug McIlroy]

> So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems
> people end up there? [At Bell Labs]

1. Bell Labs had a great reputation, though it was not at first known
   for computing.

2. Research recruiters were researchers themselves, not HR people.

3. Recruiting was for quality hires, not for particular jobs;
   complementary talent was valued.

4. Whom a candidate met on site was determined after s/he gave a seminar;
   this promoted good matchups.

5. Researchers decided for themselves what to work on--either self-
   generated or an interesting problem from elsewhere in the company.

6. If you needed to know something in most any field, you could usually
   find a willing expert to get you on track to an answer.

7. Annual merit review was collegial. No one lost out because of unlucky
   draw of a supervisor.

8. Collegiality in fact beat that of any faculty I know. Office doors
   were always open; new arrivals needed only to do good work, not to
   chase tenure. 

This culture grew from the grand original idea of the Labs: R&D for
the whole of AT&T funded by the whole of AT&T, with a long time horizon.
I joined thinking the Labs was good seasoning for academia. The culture
held me for 39 years.

The premise was viable in the days of regulated monopoly. It has been
greatly watered down since.


Doug

Re: [TUHS] Stories

[arnold]

Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems
> > people end up there? [At Bell Labs]
>
> 1. Bell Labs had a great reputation, though it was not at first known
>    for computing.
>
> .....

Sounds wonderful.  I often wished I could have gone there, but
not everyone got into 1127.

> This culture grew from the grand original idea of the Labs: R&D for
> the whole of AT&T funded by the whole of AT&T, with a long time horizon.
> I joined thinking the Labs was good seasoning for academia. The culture
> held me for 39 years.
>
> The premise was viable in the days of regulated monopoly. It has been
> greatly watered down since.

Which is a great shame, IMHO.

I've been meaning to ask here. There are a number of stories of, shall
we say pranks, pulled by the Unix room folks, and the group's sense of
humor was often reflected in writing in the man pages.

Was this more widespread in the Bell Labs culture? Did your average physicist /
chemist / electical engineer do the equivalent kinds of things?

Thanks, and thanks for the wonderful stories!

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] stories

[Steve Johnson]

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I heard about Bell Labs from someone who had a summer job a couple of
years earlier.  He said the people were smart and dedicated, and it
was not a place where everybody went home at 5PM (that was an
understatement!).  One of my professors knew someone there and gave
them a call, so an interview was set up.  It was about a 2 hour drive
from my home outside of Philadelphia, so I left three hours before the
interview, ran into some traffic, and then got horribly lost (oh for a
GPS!).  I got to the interview an hour and 15 minutes late and talked
to an HR person who said, in effect, "It's a shame you came in
today.  We hardly hire anyone, and we've already hired everyone we
need for the summer.  But since you're here, we've arranged for your
to have lunch with one of our busy researchers..."   I had a 2-hour
lunch with Tom Crowley, and we really hit it off.  Tom then took me
around and introduced me to people as "This is Steve who will be
working with us this summer...".   Then he took me back to HR, where
they effectively repeated their earlier message.  It was my first,
but far from my last, experience with organizational incoherence.  
But in any case, I got the job.  After the first summer, I was
hooked...

It's probably worth pointing out that Xerox PARC soon became a serious
competitor for computing talent, with almost no overlap with the labs
in the computer area--they were a lisp shop and WYSIWYG text
processing and such.  I had some very spirited discussions with PARC
folks at conferences that were a lot of fun and very stimulating.  In
the compiler area, IBM Yorktown Heights also did work much different
from the Labs, and lead to lively debates at conferences.

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry McVoy" <lm@mcvoy.com>
To:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Wed, 28 Nov 2018 09:17:25 -0800
Subject:[TUHS] stories

 Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn
 and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder
 how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their
 way to Bell Labs?

 When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the
 time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of
 the center of the Unix universe in my mind). So I wanted to go
 there and had to work at it a bit but I got there.

 Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that? If you were a geek was that
 the place to go? I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of
 how well known the Labs were back then.

 So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems
-
 people end up there?

 --lm



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Re: [TUHS] stories

[Kevin Bowling]

Amateur historian perspective on what supported this, not sure how
recruiting and day to day worked hopefully first parties can teach us.

* Military Industrial Complex promoted projects of grandeur in large
industrials like Bell that are probably beyond comprehension of most
recent generations (Dew line
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSSrPCE0smo, SAC-NORAD, SAGE, AUTOVON,
Telstar, etc)
* Subscriber base of general public telecom had immense scale and
reliability requirements that supported both rapid R&D and
engineering/operations progress
* Power of monopoly (see Peter Thiel's Zero to One book)

I think in light of scale and difficulty of all the work going on in
physics, electronics manufacturing/scaling, optics, RF etc the
computing work was relatively small in scope to administrators.  Why
would you not create an OS or microprocessor in such an environment?

I have some good books on this to recommend:
* The Idea Factory - most recent and popular
* A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System - 6 volumes
on different topics that show a pretty insane progression over 100
years, not sure any other company had endured that much change

There are some organizations that are vaguely like that today like IBM
Research, SRI, Riken.  There used to be more like Xerox PARC.

I do wonder if things like twitter and facebook have in effect dumbed
down the population through increased distraction and reduced
attention span.  I believe there are some studies on the later.  As
far as market forces, lots of smart people are working at stupid
companies like Facebook and Google these days.  So people are less
effectively organized and working on less interesting things with less
attention span.

Regards,
Kevin
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 10:17 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn
> and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder
> how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their
> way to Bell Labs?
>
> When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the
> time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of
> the center of the Unix universe in my mind).  So I wanted to go
> there and had to work at it a bit but I got there.
>
> Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that?  If you were a geek was that
> the place to go?  I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of
> how well known the Labs were back then.
>
> So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems -
> people end up there?
>
> --lm

[TUHS] stories

[Larry McVoy]

Ken's story got me thinking about stuff I would still like to learn
and his comment about "when I got to Bell Labs"... made me wonder
how did Ken, Dennis, Brian, Joe and the rest of the crew make their
way to Bell Labs?

When I was just starting out, Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the
time (not that Sun was the same as Bell Labs but it was sort of
the center of the Unix universe in my mind).  So I wanted to go
there and had to work at it a bit but I got there.

Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that?  If you were a geek was that
the place to go?  I was born in '62 so I don't have any memory of
how well known the Labs were back then.

So how was it that so many smart - and somewhat like minded it seems -
people end up there?

--lm