A recent article in the New York Times, Inside the Birthplace of Your Favorite Technology, provides an overview of some of the major contributions to the Future that AT&T’s Bell Labs research facility has made over the past century.
Not given as much credit as Apple, Xerox, and others for its Future contributions, New Jersey based Bell Labs (now owned by Nokia) definitely belongs in the same category. Some of the fundamental Future technologies listed in the article include:
- Communications satellites
- Cellular phone technology
- Video calling
- Digital imaging
- Solar cells and batteries
- The transistor
The transistor is itself fundamental to the other technologies in the list. And in just about any list. And to Moore’s law. The article shows three transistors on a dime in 1956, compared to the latest computer chips with over 300 trillion (yes, trillion).
The article fails to mention another foundational Bell Labs invention: the Unix operating system. The software equivalent of the transistor, Unix underpins almost all of today’s computer-based technologies.
In a very small footnote in history, Alan was lucky and privileged enough to be part of a Boy Scout Explorer post that met at Bell Labs in Murray Hill in 1976-77. He actually got to work with (well, sit near anyway) Unix inventors Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie as they were bringing their Future to the world.
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