this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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112
What Would It Take To Recreate Bell Labs? (hackaday.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills.

That's incredibly incorrect.

Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:

  • Movies with synchronous sound
  • Text-to-speech
  • Stereo broadcasts
  • Radio astronomy
  • The transistor
  • Unix
  • The C programming language
  • The calculator
  • Solar electricity
  • Transatlantic telephone cables
  • LASER
  • Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (this was part of the framework for cell phones. In the 1960s)

Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don't have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I wasn’t saying Bell Labs wasn’t innovative. The “they” in that sentence was referring to average, non-tech consumers like my grandma. The monopoly AT&T had over the Bell System funded all that research and consumers paid higher rates and had worse service because it was a monopoly.

I’m not anti-research. I’m anti-monopoly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I agree with almost all of it. Surely your grandmother or eldest living non-troglodyte relative has benefitted from transistors and calculators. Even lasers. Probably even Unix, if they use a Mac, as most tech-illiterate do.

However, the silver lining here is that this monopoly actually invested... heavily...into R&D. You don't see that now, not to the levels that they did.