It’s been said that the best way to stifle creativity by researchers is to demand that they produce immediately marketable technologies and products. This is also effectively the story of Bel…
  • jtl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    10 months ago

    Missing context here is that Bell labs was at its most productive when it was a government backed monopoly, with the govt insisting that it work in the general public benefit. It’s not possible now because that sort of public-private symbiosis has totally fallen out of favour and regulators just don’t really have the teeth to grab the bull by the horns like that anymore.

  • Troy@lemmy.caEnglish
    29·
    10 months ago

    Articles like this always tend to overlook the fact that Bell Labs wasn’t unique in its time. And other companies had very similar labs running. A famous example is Xerox Labs which invented the computer mouse and graphical windowing, among other things.

    Google had this vibe too, prior to going public.

    • madnificent@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      I don’t think Xerox invented the computer mouse. It was first drawn out by Douglass Engelbart and presented to the public in the 1968 presentation “Augmenting the Human Intellect” (you can watch it on the present day, it was recorded).

      It was my understanding (which I did not verify) that this was picked up by Xerox and others and that windowing systems evolved from there on with Xerox leading towards Desktop Publishing.

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    10 months ago

    Just use what Bell had before: a monopoly on virtually all communication to pay for crazy ideas and irregular output. Also, stomp out all competition so no one else can make any discoveries of their own. Can’t have rivals muddying the history of who invented what.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    10 months ago

    And, yet, in that time, consumers paid more for telecommunication services and basically the main innovations they got were touchtone phones replacing rotary ones and higher bills. Bell Labs being a success story doesn’t mean Ma Bell shouldn’t have been broken up.

    If consumers are paying extra to a monopoly anyway, just fund university labs and non-university research agencies (which we do). We have dozens of equivalents to Bell Labs. There’s no reason to rely on monopolists for innovation.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    A breakthrough in physics that enables a new technology to have all the benefits and zero downsides of our current globally deployed communication standards. Like true wireless energy, or something that can replace undersea cables.