[TUHS] Working at Bell Labs: photos by Larry Luckham, 1967

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 12:46 PM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 11:17 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 14, 2024 at 10:16 PM George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
>> > Forgive me if these predate the glory days, found them interesting
>> >
>> > https://retronaut.com/retronaut-capsules/1967-life-at-bell-labs
>>
>> These came up a few years ago, in the halcyon pre-COVID "before" days
>> (aka, March 2019), and there was some discussion at the time.
>>
>> This facility was in northern California (Oakland, I believe) and was
>> part of an experiment in making directory assistance both faster and
>> less resource intensive. Ralph Corderoy wrote to Larry Luckham and got
>> some more detail about the experiment; John Linderman subsequently
>> chimed in with some of the business and vision failures that led to
>> the overall effort being scuttled, as one of his early projects built
>> on the results of the experiment.
>>
>> Links:
>> https://tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/thread/32BDNXR2TD7P6MTLS5HBHROGFCUKPCFV/
>> https://tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/thread/RNDFGAXB3LPLAWO46YZKXB5BWLN6GGYN/#RNDFGAXB3LPLAWO46YZKXB5BWLN6GGYN
>
> I didn't participate in the California testing. I recall it ran on IBM equipment,
> but I have lost all contact with my then-supervisor, who did participate.

Right; what I had understood back in 2019 was that the project you got
roped into used some of the results of that experiment, but that you
were not directly involved. Apologies if that was unclear in my recent
message.

> It's hard for me to understand why they set up a fairly elaborate operation
> just to investigate directory assistance, why it would have been in
> California, and why it took years to conduct (and then abort) the test.
> It seems more likely to me that the center already existed, and the
> directory assistance test just took advantage of it having some spare cycles.
> But that's just sheer speculation on my part. -- jpl

Ralph Corderoy's repost of Larry Luckham's email to him went into some
detail here: https://tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/OEVIAPKUO4Q6UA5UN6F5AOTXSISWLFNV/

The gist of it is that the bay area was chosen as a representative
market for a large urban area, and CCA was contracted to do the
programming. Why IBM hardware? Unclear on my most recent reading.
Apparently PacBell provided some of the space.

        - Dan C.