Bell Labs video

Curious Droid (Paul Shiletto) posted an interesting video on Bell Labs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eksTJOmlxbU

It's amazing that Bell Labs was the source of so many important inventions and concepts.  We've all heard about the transistor but the LASER, solar cells, MOSFET, Unix operating system, C programming language and on and on.

But their Nobel count is apparently stuck at 9.  Probably won't be more stuff emerging from the remnants of Bell Labs.

I remember hearing a lecture from the Dean of Engineering at UWM when I was a freshman.  One thing he mentioned was that UWM (in Milwaukee) had sent more graduates that year to work at Bell Labs than UW in Madison (the biggest engineering school in Wisconsin).  I was very impressed at the time.  But when I started working I met a few former Bell Labs employees, they were smart but none of them were inventing the successor to the transistor, they were mostly software guys.

I've still got a little retirement money invested with Nokia but that was due to the same corporate consolidations that brought Bell Labs to Nokia.

Bell Labs and other corporate research divisions like XEROX PARC (laser printing, graphical user interface computers) are apparently the first place that Wall Street likes to have cut.  Who knows where the future will be headed once the current technologies are fully developed.

Some stuff is just hard to do:  self driving cars, artificial intelligence, fusion power, strategic defense - they may never get done without someone doing more basic research than is currently being done.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm