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Bell Labs Unix Group Disbanded 270
wandazulu writes "Peter Salus over at UnixReview.com is reporting that AT&T Department 1127, responsible for creating and maintaining Unix, has been officially disbanded. The article provides an interesting "where are they now?" list of the original authors of Unix."
we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is sad, and a little ominous. I worked at a telco years ago, and managed to fanagle a chat on the phone with Ritchie one time when a Bell worker was on site for some software installations. Cool.
Anyway, in my arguments to encourage research into trying new ways of doing things, I always used Bell Labs as my favorite example/reason why we should. Guess I won't have that anymore. Sigh.
What I fear most is the lack of research for research's sake. A lot of things we use today are a direct or indirect result of companies allowing a certain amount of "what if" thinking and activity to go on. Even better, some companies, like Bell Labs actually allocated specifically for that.
I don't think research in commercial context is really research at all and may even be counterproductive in creating new and better technology (if commercial research into products were for "quality", would there even be a Britney Spears?).
The last bastion I know of and trust is Google. They seem to be dedicated to the cause. But, they're young, they're new, and they haven't had to deal with stockholders in bad times yet.
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a lot of research that goes on you just never hear about it. How about http://www.stirlingengine.com/ [stirlingengine.com] or http://www.nanosolar.com/ [nanosolar.com] ?? Those companies founders are risking it all, and if they fail, you'll never hear about it
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2)
Google has a policy of giving people a percentage of their work hours to fiddle around with personal interests. At worst, it raises morale. At best it produces new business opportunities.
But ignoring that, even Google as a company probably does more research than you might think. Of course profit will be a big motivator for it, but I bet there's a lot of very cool stuff going on inside that hasn't yet been publicized, and some may never be until somebody writes a book in
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2, Informative)
WHAT YOU SAY? [google.com]
[totally obvious whoring, sorry.]
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2)
but hasn't it always been that way? Er, well - maybe it used to be that way. Today we have ginormous established companies that use all the tools available (primarly lobyists/governments) to suppress competitors that make them obsolete.
thanks for the links, btw.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2, Interesting)
Bell spent billions on research, the "apple man" voice was invented at bell labs, they did a whole lot of voice synthesis research that I am familiar with. They did a lot of other stuff, I am not as familiar with, but voice synthesis, v
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about that. Google's mission is to "Organize the world's information". Considering such an undertaking has never before been attempted on such a scale (unless you count Yahoo's manual indexing), then I suspect Google engages in quite a bit of advanced research. Why else would they hire brilliant, accomplished PhDs [google.com] and encourage them to research and publish [google.com]. It's certainly not to master AJAX web scripting techniques. Granted, Google's research is in more nebulous areas of unstructured datamining, information retrieval, algorithms, AI, OS & filesystem design, and maybe they won't develop the next general, purpose Unix or better materials for spaceship construction, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they don't do research. A brief list of their research areas are:
You might say they're standing on the shoulders of the giants of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but in terms of computer science, show us someone who isn't. That doesn't mean Google's research could be any less important or ground breaking. And don't underestimate the value of the knowledge aggregation and improving language translation ability of their search engine. Who knows how this could affect human civilization, maybe even to the point of speeding up our advancement by connecting minds with more relevant information more quickly than the printing press, the worthless main stream media, and even P2P email allowed. Only time will tell...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:3, Interesting)
All areas of research must be funded, because they often yield interesting stuff not sought for. I can not express this strongly enough.
Rich...
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2)
"All areas of research must be funded"
In the absence of infinite funds, this is impossible. If there is a dollar being spent on research, someone, somewhere has to decide to spend it on one thing and not another. Better to spend that dollar on an area of research that seems most likely to produce a sought for benefit; that area is just as like
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Insightful)
That's okay, you just need to change what Bell Labs is an example of. I mean really, what has Bell Labs produced recently? Some very impressive stuff if you actually look at some of what has managed to trickle it's way out. Things like Plan9 [bell-labs.com] and Inferno [vitanuova.com] are actually very impressive indeed in terms of the core ideas (that is, the part the research division is responsible for). Had a little more money been thrown into really building something out of those they could have been huge. So really Bell Labs is an example of what happens when management stops paying attention to, and having faith in, their research department.
Want another example. How about Microsoft research? They have some very good people there, Tony Hoare [microsoft.com] and Leslie Lamport [microsoft.com] to name just two off the top of my head. If you dig around through some of the stuff they are working on there's some amazing ideas there. How much of that is actually seeing the light of day and making it into product? Very very little.
The reason Google seems so good is not because they have more good people doing research - in practice they probably don't. It's because management spends more time listening to and working with the research teams to see that those ideas actually get used.
The death of Bell Labs is just another example of what happens when the research department gets ignored. And yes, I am a bit bitter, having worked in a research department that regularly got ignored.
Jedidiah.
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2)
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2)
Two reasons. First, pure research into many of their areas wasn't as "pure" as many make it out to be. Claude Shannon's work had a direct effect on telecommunications. There's a reason he was working on what he was.
Seco
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Insightful)
"she helped to turbocharge product development by the long-coddled Bell Labs engineers."
A guy told me once on an airplane beware any company or person who makes the cover of Businessweek because it usually means they've peaked and are starting down. He said it in context of SGI and its a rule that worked just as well for Carly.
Hindsight being 20/20 you have to wonder if Carly didn't get lucky at Lucent thanks to the bubble and she was made to look like a superstar when in fact she was a one women wrecking ball for research and development at both Lucent/Bell Labs and HP and its labs.
Another Carly theme at Bell Labs, if you go to their web site [bell-labs.com] today they are a case study in out sourcing with their greatest achievement today looking to be the fact that they have labs in China, India and Ireland.
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Insightful)
It's tough to say goodbye to an old friend, but I'd never want to go back to the "good old days" that spawned those conditions.
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Insightful)
We still have the universities, and IBM still has a sizable research division. But the exclusive focus by most of today's companies on the next quarter's revenue means we're eating the seed corn.
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh uh! Not so fast. We have software patents to stop any such subversive activity!
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:5, Informative)
And Bell Labs gave up Unix _long_ ago:
Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. -- Rob Pike circa 1991
Bell Labs moved from Unix to Plan 9 [bell-labs.com] in the late 80' and then went on to work on Inferno [vitanuova.com].
Both Plan 9 and Inferno are Open Source now and live on outside Bell Labs, but their developers like to be very quiet, they rather code than talk or maintain websites.
But here are a couple of links:
And also many of the ideas of Plan 9 and Inferno live on as part of other projects like v9fs [sourceforge.net](9P distributed file system protocol support for Linux), Plan 9 from User Space [swtch.com](a port of many Plan 9 components to Unix), and wmii [modprobe.de](a window manager partially inspired by Acme [bell-labs.com].)
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:4, Informative)
Some of it even made headlines eons ago, most links seem to be dead by now, but I found a slashdot article about it, title could not be more explicit:
Thompson Critical of Linux, poor ESR was so taken aback that had to go ask for a "clarification" from Ken.
Hell, go read 9fans [psu.edu], not one week goes by without someone expressing how much they 'love' Linux(or Lunix, as it's known there).
Oh, oh, and here is another quote taken directly from the Plan 9 fortunes file:
Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs. - D. Presotto
And of course the classic:
This is not LINUX! This is Plan 9. There are rules. -boyd/walter
Re:we've still got Google, for now (Score:2, Informative)
They were free to compete in the computer industry after the divestiture of 1984.
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/3b2/ [obsoleteco...museum.org]
They sold tens of thousands of those things.
Insensitive (Score:5, Insightful)
"My take is that 1127 probably reached Schiavo status when Rob, Presotto, et al. fled west to Google.
That expression is a tad insensitive, don't you think?
Re:Insensitive (Score:2)
Re:Insensitive (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess... (Score:2)
Re:I guess... (Score:2)
Re:I guess... (Score:2)
To who? (Score:2)
Re:Insensitive (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Insensitive (Score:5, Funny)
"My take is that 1127 probably reached Schiavo status when Rob, Presotto, et al. fled west to Google.
That expression is a tad insensitive, don't you think?
Yes, it is insensitive. He should have said "My take is that 1127 probably reached George W. Bush status when Rob, Presotto, et al. fled west to Google.
Re:Insensitive (Score:2)
New slang (Score:2)
Getting Schiavoed- Someone whos job has been eliminated for practical purposes but is kept on the payroll in a meaningless position.
Re:Insensitive (Score:2, Insightful)
What? You mean kept alive longer than reasonable for herself and her parents? Yeah, that was sick
Re:Insensitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I would love to see him sue all of them. But I am guessing that he just wants it over with and to be away from all the idiots.
Re:Insensitive (Score:3, Informative)
Doing what his wife wanted in the first place? Hardly [weeklystandard.com].
Re:Insensitive (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Insensitive (Score:2)
Huh, now that you mention it, they are kind of similar. I wonder if the creators were thinking about that.
Re:Insensitive (Score:2, Insightful)
Pretty close to what's going on with 1127, so...
Linux Labs. (Score:4, Funny)
They've joined Linco. Developing cutting-edge technology to put into a commodity OS. With Linus as Director.
Re:Linux Labs. (Score:2)
The real question is (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The real question is (Score:5, Funny)
Very complicated stuff, I must admit.
And all the nerds sing (Score:2, Funny)
Thank you 1127
Good times (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good times (Score:5, Insightful)
These days, if you're seen having a conversation of longer than two minutes you start to get the attention of management. Geeks aren't like everyone else, and they aren't motivated in the usual ways or by the usual things.
The effort now, seems to be to put armies of non-geeks at the keyboard, hoping that they can make up with numbers and procedures what they lack in talent. I just hope that this one doesn't turn out like The Celts vs. The Romans.
Hey! Maybe we should sacrifice a secretary to the god of system stability. Just be sure to start the fire with a printout of the last core dump.
Re:Good times (Score:2)
Re:Good times (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good times (Score:2)
I agree. I will be a college freshman CS major in the fall, and I have been interested in computer science research for quite a while. I have read some of Kernighan's, Ritchie's, Pike's, Thompson's, and some of the other Unix guys' papers (some of them even came with my OS, FreeBSD; thanks Caldera for releasing the sources). I always heard that Bell Labs was a very interesting place, and I am intrigued by the work that these researchers have done and continue to do.
My goal is to either become a research
Great contributions made (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great contributions made (Score:5, Insightful)
Another name to add to the list... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman when I interviewed with Mathworks a couple of years ago. I was taken aback by his humility, and the poor guy was embarrassed when I requested his autograph :) He has a former license plate in his office that reads "YACCMAN".
Re:Another name to add to the list... (Score:2)
I use what happened to Jim Ossanna (author of troff) as a parable - when he died, the troff code was so Complex and Wonderful that nobody could understand it - they just had to rewrite it with less features - hence nroff (new runoff).
Re:Another name to add to the list... (Score:2)
I can't help the nostalgy (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's us not forget (Score:4, Informative)
Another important contributor, Michael Lesk, is currently on the faculty at Rutgers University.
I'm sure there are many more that deserve recognition.
Re:Let's us not forget (Score:2)
By all means we should not forget them. And, while I know that you know this, other Slashdot readers might not know that both of these amazing men are dead, having died far too young. Sigh...there are days when I feel I am the last person on the planet to have used troff, Scribe, and LaTeX. And troff started the whole game.
Re:Let's us not forget (Score:4, Informative)
So long, Unix Neck Beards... (Score:2)
Well, at least as well as the product you developed, maintained, improved, and sent off to blossom into what it is today.
"Thanks for all the fish!" indeed!
What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't do? (Score:2)
But when it comes to the stuff that gets used, I have a hard time remembering anything that came out of AT&T that I use. Now I would guess the NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD people are the ones doing state-of-the-art stuff, with Unix.
Similarly, the BSD people must have had the sa
Re:What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
But the stuff you really think about and use, like time dialation, that was all Einstein. And Newtonion Mechanics is hardly state of the art.
Einstein, Heisenberg, and others must have looked back and thought; "What did you really contribute, Newton? You didn't even have the concept of light having a finite speed."
No one ever stood on the shoulders of giant before, right?
Re:What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't (Score:5, Funny)
Your analogy is poor.... (Score:2)
While relativity and quantum physics are at odds with one another (everyone from Einstein to Stephen Hawking have been working on a unified theory without a whole lot of luck (string theory is promising)), Newton's theory ultimately managed to unify cosmic and terrestrial forces as were observable in his time period. To this day, the Newtonian physics model is still valid in many disciplines and is still used.
Rather than kn
Re:What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't (Score:5, Funny)
No. If I have been able to see further, it is because I am surrounded by midgets.
Re:What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the BSD guys; McKusick, Joy, Karels, and a few other people that I have forgotten, have made some huge contributions to the Unix world (you can thank Bill Joy for vi and the C shell). You can also thank them, as well as Bill Jolitz, for being able to run freely available BSD derivatives on your PCs. However, the original Unix 32V sources (which BSD was derived from until Karels decided to purge BSD of all AT&T "taint" in the late 80s), the orignial kernels, the original programs, and many of the
Re:What did they do that B[erkeley]SD guys didn't (Score:2)
The bourne shell?
Plug-in device drivers?
Hierarchical (tree) directory structures?
Devices as operating system files?
Mountable file systems?
Command line pipes and redirection?
A portable OS?
SUID/SGID?
awk, sed, grep, lex, yacc and make?
Doug McIlroy (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, there's something to be said for learning data structures and operating systems from a guy who helped invent the idea of pipes.
McIlroy's homepage [dartmouth.edu].
Re:Doug McIlroy (Score:2)
Eww. Whatever for? Undergrads don't deserve to be taught. The little parasites. All they think about is sex and beer. They're not interested in learning at all. What a waste of time. Come back in 4 years, I'm busy. Let me finish my research.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.......
not an AT&T department (Score:5, Informative)
Re:not an AT&T department (Score:2)
IBM still does research.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IBM still does research.... (Score:2)
Google, OTOH, has a more limited model; they sell well placed, discreet ads on free services people want to use. Research in chemistry, for example, would be very hard to justify as anything but charity. The few papers [google.com] google has published reflect this.
The declining research
Re:IBM still does research.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason IBM Research remains today is that they were able to adapt and find a balance between profitability and pure research. My grip is that Google is being portrayed as the last keeper of this "dead" field and it is my belief that they are most certainly not.
IBM Research was key in the development of the PC, relational databases, datamining, and countless other fields.
Diminishing Talent Pool? (Score:2, Interesting)
Lucent, not AT&T (Score:2)
Like it or not, Microsoft does a lot of research. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Like it or not, Microsoft does a lot of researc (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Like it or not, Microsoft does a lot of researc (Score:3, Funny)
Clippy
Wizards
Exploits
GUI inconsistencies
Flight simulators
BASIC
Re:Like it or not, Microsoft does a lot of researc (Score:2)
What field is that. I actually want to look at what one of their divisions that is known for doing world class stuff of the caliber of the old Bell Labs, PARC, etc. And if you don't mind me asking how can you come to the conclusion its top quality? Is it because they churn out large numbers of semi impressive papers for the premier conference in your field, SIGGRAPH in graphics for instance.
My jaundiced view of research papers is that yes some of them are
Re:Like it or not, Microsoft does a lot of researc (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Like it or not, Microsoft does a lot of researc (Score:2)
Too many managers? (Score:2)
Wow, the only thing I can think of as a response is:
Et tu, brute?
Wait! (Score:2)
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet!
Who? What? (Score:2)
What is Salus talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess everyone thinks that Thompson and Ritchie were in the same department during the 1970s, but I do remember always knowing that they were not.
Note that by 1980 UNIX-related OS research at Bell Labs was nearly completed. Development of UNIX, which is where I worked, was very active and remained so for another 10+ years, but that's different from research. (Center 127 did research in many areas unrelated to UNIX.)
So, undoubtedly there was a recent reorg and some department went away, and maybe it was even 1127, but what that means, if anything (since Thompson, Kernighan, and others left a while ago), I have no idea.
Anyway, I think the gist of the article and most of the responses here is that it's sad that AT&T and Lucent are no longer combined and able to spend as lavishly on research as they once did. That part of this thread is true.
A few posts are from Bell Labs people who said it was a great place to work, and that's true, too.
Re:What is Salus talking about? (Score:2)
So, I think Salus should have written Center 1127, not Department 1127, but the gist of the article is correct.
Re:What is Salus talking about? (Score:4, Informative)
long live Unix? (Score:2)
(before you mod me troll, back off of the mouse, and try to see the humor in the above comment!)
Sad to see 1127 finally die. (Score:2)
It is indeed a reflection of the Labs' culture and research environment vanishing, never to return...
It was a great environment, and we made some great things there.
--
Take care,
Tomas
Re:Serious question... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Serious question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the invention of the entire C programming language count?
Re:Serious question... (Score:2)
Some of the earliest instances of C linklists, queues and stacks came out of AT&T research labs in the 1970s. Years later it hit the classrooms of Caltechs, Berkeley, WPI, MIT.
Re:Serious question... (Score:2)
Maybe C+ (Objective-C) did, but certainly not C++.
Re:Serious question... (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Making the command interpreter a user level process instead of an integral part of the kernel.
2) Treating all files as simple streams of data. Mainframes of the day that I've had experience with all forced some type of record format on files.
3) Making everything visible to the sytem as a file(file systems, devices, message queues). On other systems these are handled via special reserved words understood by the command interpreter or system.
4) Pipes between processes.
5) The C prog
Re:Serious question... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:about freakin' time (Score:3, Insightful)
A chair is ancient technology, but I'm happy to be sitting in one as I read slashdot today. Not all things are wrong just because they are old.
Re:about freakin' time (Score:2, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Re:about freakin' time (Score:2, Informative)
Re:about freakin' time (Score:2)
Really? I never knew they started, much less that they were still doing it.
I'd have thought that the idea of a wooden hose wouldn't leave the land of half-baked ideas.
Re:Dennis is on my bookshelf (Score:2)