[TUHS] AT&T Research

[Norman Wilson]

John Linderman:

  Every "divestiture" had an adverse effect on critical mass. The split
  between AT&T and Bellcore was a big hurt.
  The split between AT&T and Lucent was another. When I joined the Labs in
  1973, it was an honor to work there.

====

Maybe I'm blinded because I wasn't there earlier, but
to me, joining Bell Labs in 1984, just after the original
divestiture that split off Bellcore, was still an honour.
There were certainly good people I never had a chance to
work with because they went to Bellcore, but in 1127 at
least, morale was good, management stayed out of our way
and encouraged researchers to work on whatever interested
them, and a lot of good work was done even if that group
was no longer the source of All UNIX Truth.  (In fact I
think we missed the boat on some things by being too
inwardly-focussed, TCP/IP in particular, but divestiture
didn't cause that.)

It seemed to me that the rot didn't really begin to show
until around 1990, the time I left (though not for that
reason; this is hindsight).  Upper management were
visibly shifting focus from encouraging researchers to
do what they did best to treating researchers as a source
of new products to be marketed.  The urge to break the
company up further seems to me to have been a symptom,
not a cause; the cause was a general corporate shift
toward short-term profits rather than AT&T's traditional
long-term view.  AT&T was far from alone in making this
mistake, and research in the US has suffered greatly all
over as a result.

I remember visiting a couple of years after I left, and
chatting with my former department head.  He said 1127
was having trouble convincing new researchers to join up
because they'd heard (correctly) that the physics and
chemistry research groups were being cut back, and feared
computing science would have its own reckoning soon enough.
In fact the corporate direction of the time was to cut
back on the physical sciences and push to expand software
research and development, but I don't blame the new
researchers for being concerned (nor did my ex-DH), and
in the long term they turned out to be more right than
wrong.

Nothing lasts forever, but the classic Bell Labs lasted
a long time.  We have nothing like it now.  I don't think
we'll have anything like it any time soon.  That's sad.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON