It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bel…
  • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    Articles like this always tend to overlook the fact that Bell Labs wasn’t unique in its time. And other companies had very similar labs running. A famous example is Xerox Labs which invented the computer mouse and graphical windowing, among other things.

    Google had this vibe too, prior to going public.

    • madnificent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      I don’t think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation “Augmenting the Human Intellect” (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).

      It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.

    If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills.

      That’s incredibly incorrect.

      Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:

      • Movies with synchronous sound
      • Text-to-speech
      • Stereo broadcasts
      • Radio astronomy
      • The transistor
      • Unix
      • The C programming language
      • The calculator
      • Solar electricity
      • Transatlantic telephone cables
      • LASER
      • Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (this was part of the framework for cell phones. In the 1960s)

      Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don’t have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.