[TUHS] AT&T Research

[Rob Pike]

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 at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 11:36:35AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> >    https://spinroot.com/pico/watertower.jpg
>
> 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
>
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