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. I don't see anything special about any of the remaining fragments, and they seem to be determined to make themselves less and less attractive. ("Come work for AT&T instead of Google and we'll allow you to spend several weeks each year training for strike duty for which you'll have to be prepared to show up on 48 hours notice, and, by the way, that vacation time you cannot take because you have to have to remain available cannot be carried over.") -- jpl On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 9:32 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 11:36:35AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: So there's a question. Obviously all the anecdotes I've heard about Bell Labs have come from Unix people. But there were many others working and researching there. How was the interaction between the Unix people and the non-Unix people at the Labs? Especially when Unix became "big"? Did the non-Unix people also pull pranks like the watertower? Cheers, Warren

The interactions were great. Research at least was a multidisciplinary utopia, in my experience. People knew what was going on in other departments, talks were open to anyone who wanted to attend, and doors were always open. During my time there, I worked or at least had substantive conversations with mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, astronomers, acoustics researchers, and many others. Various eople in 1127 had longer-term collaborations with essentially every other group in Murray Hill at one time or another. It was an environment of sharing progress, ideas, and advancements. Not everyone played with the rest, and we didn't do as much work with development was management asked, but that world was very special. I miss it every day. But to answer your question: Yes, there were many pranks by many pranksters, but the water tower was undoubtedly the most visible. -rob On Sun, Jul 12, 2020 at 6:32 AM Warren Toomey <wkt(a)tuhs.org> wrote:

2020-07-12 Indian Hill, Columbus, Whippany, Holmdel, and other BTL sites worked on automating the Telephone system. A lot of the software was designed, implemented, and deployed into the telcos and AT&T Longlines on Unix. Operating telcos welcomed all Unix based systems. I worked on the NOC (Network Operating Center) in Bedminster, NJ, and the LMOS (Loop Maintenance Operations system) both of which were designed, implemented, and deployed using Unix as the operating system. Unix was a huge thing throughout the labs for developing solutions for the Telcos from 1976 onwards. I was at BTL from 1976-1983 and traveled to Murray Hill often. I met and engaged with many of the folks (Feldman, Chesson, Aho, Bourne, Thompson, Ritchie, Lesk, Weinberger, and even Doug). All of them were welcoming and extremely patient with me and to this day I remember all of them. Unix was a godsend to me after having to deal with IBM operating systems for scientific calculations. I arrived into BTL in 1976 in Columbus, Ohio and all I had ever used before was punched cards and OS/360 systems. (cbunix uber alles :-). "Messages" and "semaphores" were what was in the Unix (cbunix) we used and I don't recall who implemented them.("Messages" was interprocess messages. I even forget how they worked, but using "messages", I implemented inter-processor messages where processes on one computer could msg processes on a 2nd computer without any modification to the Unix source code.) The most depressing thing even to today is the deplorable lack of wisdom demonstrated by IBM, Microsoft, and AT&T in bringing computing to the public. LSX could have been deployed on the first IBM PC (1982). I suspect IBM and its vaunted research lab and Gates/Allen were singularly ignorant of the revolutionary ideas from 1127 even in 1981. AT&T was complicit by holding Unix close to its chest (in search of profit) while enjoying a government protected monopoly. Indeed, after spending 17 years in IBM, it is more than likely IBM was arrogant and dismissive of 'unix' (as was DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation) and especially the C programming language. One only needs to look at the source code of AIX to see that all of Doug's "principals" were missing and presumed dead in the IBM AIX software culture. No software invention in the world of computing compares to what Ken, Dennis and 1127 folks have given the world. Now, 50 years later, the world is embracing Unix. There is a political story here about excellence and profit and how they relate; not to be told by me, here. Ed PS: I spent approximately 2 hours trying to get the presentation of this post to look like what I produced in gvim (vi = Bill Joy). All formatting WORK is a direct result of Bill Gates (and Steve Jobs) not understanding or listening to Doug and his principles of text, simplicity, and pipes. On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 5:30 PM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: -- Advice is judged by results, not by intentions. Cicero

scj(a)yaccman.com wrote: <rant> I saw this *a lot* when I worked at Intel; being forced to use the wrong tools for software development because of political considerations instead of technical ones. One of the reasons I was super glad to leave there and why I think that Intel as a whole will never make it as a software company. (There are pockets there that understand software, but the majority of the company does not.) </rant> Sorry, Arnold