My first internship was at a company that was (apparently) a pretty big deal in the 80s, and by the time I'd gotten there was relegated to a quarter corner of a small floor in a building. The passion had long since left, the three remaining programmers were just ticking off days, and a sort of miasma of sadness and despair hung in the air. There was a brief hope when we showed up to work on a goofy R&D project, and within a few weeks you could tell the office was happier to have my co-intern and I around, if for no other reason than we were fresh, youthful faces.
I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and it was stagnation.
In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other things.
By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to make things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear.
This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.
Interesting article. I live down the street from the Acatel-Lucent Murray Hill campus, and have explored it occasionally while running.
The campus is bizarrely sad, like the article describes, a place where its best years seem behind it. They have one of those trail/fitness courses that snakes around the back, and it's in terrible disrepair. And a basketball court with broken nets and weeds growing through it. But they installed a brand new shuffleboard court! I guess the demographics of the place have changed...
A sad thing happened to me recently. I had looked up some data files that accompanied Kernighan's "Practice of Programming" book from a server at Bell Labs [0], and had downloaded a couple of the files from chapter 3, but today I get an "Unable to load page" error message.
I live in Holmdel and I've spelunked Bell Labs many times since it's closed, but not the main building as seen in these pictures. The satellite buildings to the south are in disrepair but are very interesting. The semi-anechoic chamber was among the best preserved, located in a small shed on top of a hill. I gained access by gently kicking in a small window near the main door. Everything important had been stripped out but the essentials remained- the turntable was still intact along with the stairs down to the control room. A visitor log book found here contained several records, including emerging cell phones and even the sega genesis. I moved onto the office next which was where I found most of my treasure. Mugs, books, branded memorabilia, etc. was poured all over the floor- it gave me the impression the facility was abandoned rather quickly. On my wall is my favorite piece, a large blueprint of "buildings within 1000 ft of the EMI facility" which was located nearby.
The second most interesting building was the "Oceanic wave test facility". Its a fairly mundane building along the perimeter of the property, located between an emergency power plant and the strong waste holding tanks. On one of my first visits here the room was filled with equipment- open books on desks facing a mainframe computer filled the room. I couldn't get in because I was worried about tripping an alarm or alerting the patrolling security guard so I left. On my next visit all of the equipment was gone.
There are a few other buildings and interesting artifacts (including a replica horn radio made of solid metal), but since it was acquired security has tightened up a bit. I took a ton of pictures, maybe one day I'll post em.
I used to work in Murray Hill, but traveled a bunch to Holmdel and Crawford Hill facilities. I'm not totally surprised by the oceanic wave sim; There used to be a sizeable submarine fiber group before it got sold to Tyco.
In front of the building stretching about 50 feet was a tunnel, now flooded. Rumor has it that there is an even larger tunnel encircling the perimeter of the facility. I checked google maps at the time and could see evidence for this. I believe the entrance is located in a cooling tower near the baseball diamonds but that facility has more intense locks.
The replica horn I found in front of the "Global Compliance Test Facility" right across from the wave facility. It's not too large (probably the size of a person), but it's very very heavy.
There is an argument to be made that industrial R&D these days is more about the D and less about the R than it once was but Bell Labs was always sui generis--and a creature of AT&T's telephone monopoly (which was hardly an unalloyed good). But the world is also a lot different than in Bell Labs' heyday. I'd be genuinely curious to hear about what areas or types of important research that would once have been done aren't being done today in the absence of a true Bell Labs equivalent.
So is this place closed and the author is just reminiscing about the building? I feel like an idiot that I can seem to tell where reality starts and the fiction ends.
Prose like this feels to me like the outcome of a peculiar disease which seems to affect particularly tech-oriented writers who have achieved a certain level of notoriety; the task of communicating ideas becomes subordinate to the florid expression of the author's own wonderfulness.
If the author had spent as much time actually telling us what these people do and what's interesting about it, as he spent flopping on the floor weeping "I'm not worthy!" about their intelligence, it might've been an interesting read.
While I have no idea how you've drawn a link between florid prose and tech authors -- try reading articles in major media outlets about any topic and you will probably see a similar style -- the writing in this article is cringeworthy, and smacks of intellectual laziness.
I find it disconcerting when one of the repeated themes of a piece is the author's own ignorance and inability to understand the people he is talking to.
I highly recommend _Another Great Day at Sea, Life Aboard The USS George H.W. Bush_ by Geoff Dyer with photographs by Chris Steele-Perkins, from the same 'Writers in Residence' series as Kitten Clone.
Here's a sample from chapter 22:
> One of the perks of having my own room was the freedom to fart whenever I felt the urge. The disadvantage was that Newell invariably knocked on my door seconds after I'd done so. It was almost as if, by breaking wind, I had summoned him — a faster and more efficient method than calling him on the phone. On this occasion he and the snapper had come to tell me that our visit to Flight Deck Control had been moved forward so we had to get up there right away.
This is a very good article -- and it is about much more than Bell Labs.
In the later sections the author attacks singularity problems, humanities place as it continues to virtualize more and more of itself, and frames Bell Labs as the remnants of reality left over (and maybe we still inhabit) after we move our minds further and further from our physical presence.
I wonder when this will happen to google and facebook. Happend to Xerox Labs, then Bell Labs/lucent. It's hard to imagine google and facebook being ghosts from the past, but everything must end at some point right?
When a company gets big enough, the people who operate the machine that is the company become more prominent than the people that do what the company is supposedly in existence for. Because when a company gets that big, the sole reason it exists is to make money, and what it does to make money is incidental. In that sense, Google is exactly the same as Kroger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroger
Every large billion dollar company is doomed to be a large billion dollar company.
I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and it was stagnation.
In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other things.
By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to make things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear.
This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.