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

[KenUnix]

A company I used to work for was vacating a building. I asked, has anyone
checked under the raised floor tiles?

The answer was no. Well I did and found a lot of history down there. From
component parts from long forgotten
systems to water cooling lines for long gone IBM heavy metal and a ground
window.

-Ken


On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 7:59 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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 at 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 at 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
>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
End of line
JOB TERMINATED
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