[TUHS] Re: Sad news: Bell Labs leaving Murray Hill.

[segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

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While my gut says not likely, I'm holding out hope that Nokia is keen on ensuring someone does a historical sweep of the premises before all is said and done. You never know what might be sitting forgotten in a closet somewhere...a lot of history has gone down in those illustrious halls, formative moments in our quest for better technology for which a modern equivalent fails to come to mind.

For me it's not just about innovations though, but a culture of curiosity, openness, and what feels like genuine interest in bettering the human condition that seeps from so much of the work accomplished by MH and other Bell Labs sites over the decades. A video I watched recently about the breakup of the Bell System echoed what I see in countless recollections of Bell Labs alumni, a sense that their work was contributing to something greater for everyone, not just the bottom line of the telephone company. Hopefully the lessons Bell Labs has taught many an engineer, scientist, and businessperson over the years outlive these facilities by orders of magnitude, but in either case, sad to see the physical artifacts of such important times passing too into the sands of time.

- Matt G.
On Monday, December 11th, 2023 at 1:21 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> April 16, 2014, from the Unix room:
>
> "I'm about to turn this terminal off,
> the last one in the Unix Room. It's the
> same 400MHz Pentium II I've had since
> before <someone> left."
>
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 11:46 AM Marty McGowan, MIT Club of Princeton <martymcg@fastmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thus following the Holmdel facility into the Halls of Oblivion.
>>
>> my current location, just E of the NJ Tpke, now splits the distance between them.
>>
>> I was in HO in the late '80s, at MH in the mid '90s, there to divide the corporate directory.
>>
>> Anecdote on the latter: The "company to be named" - i.e. Lucent had to shell out Hundreds of 1000s to Yet Another Garage Tronics in Silicon Valley for rights to the name -- the internet was young enough that the Name Search committee didn't have "Dot Com" in it's dictionary as yet.
>>
>> =*+[]* Marty McGowan +1 908 230-3739
>> [VP of Membership, MIT Club of Princeton](https://alumcommunity.mit.edu/topics/23427/memberships)https://alumcommunity.mit.edu/topics/23427/memberships
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 9, 2023, at 15:37, John Floren via TUHS wrote:
>>
>>> I can't believe they'd give up the building, it's a beautiful structure. Maybe they'll use it for other groups.
>>>
>>> john

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