12 Dec
2023
12 Dec
'23
1:22 a.m.
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(a)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(a)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(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
--
End of line
JOB TERMINATED
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