Should New Jersey's Old Bell Labs Become a 'Museum of the Internet'? (medium.com) 54
"Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill," writes journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (in an op-ed for New Jersey's Star-Ledger newspaper).
"The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more." I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.
The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World's Fair.
There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society.
Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell...? The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school... Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research.
The text of Jarvis's piece is behind subscription walls, but has apparently been re-published on X by innovation theorist John Nosta.
In one of the most interesting passages, Jarvis remembers visiting Bell Labs in 1995. "The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history."
"The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more." I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.
The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence — not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World's Fair.
There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society.
Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell...? The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school... Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines — technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design — could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research.
The text of Jarvis's piece is behind subscription walls, but has apparently been re-published on X by innovation theorist John Nosta.
In one of the most interesting passages, Jarvis remembers visiting Bell Labs in 1995. "The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history."
not just internet (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be a shame for the museum to deal exclusively with the internet. I'd rather see that as a part of a broader museum covering the many areas in which Bell Labs did important work.
I wonder how much would have to be done to make it safe for museum or educational use. Some of the Murray Hill buildings have, or had when I was there, not only natural gas lines but hydrogen lines in the walls. Some labs used very nasty chemicals, such as hydrofluoric acid.
Re:not just internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, internet was a very small part of what they did. I interviewed once in the building there and it was a pretty nice facility (the big front building, probably other labe stuff in detached buildings). Big lawn out front with a couple of deer even. Didn't get the job, but interviewed with some plan 9 guy, later at BellCore I talked to the guy who invented Make. Lots of history over there in a few square miles. I always wondered why it didn't become the big tech hub that Silicon Valley became.
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I always wondered why it didn't become the big tech hub that Silicon Valley became.
AT&T had some monopoly limits on entering computer markets and then when it split up failed to move to a tech strategy [wikipedia.org]. I'm guessing that there just wasn't enough possibility to start companies around that whole mess?
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In 1984, there was the AT&T PC 6300.
It was overpriced and had no advantage over other MS-DOS clones.
Monopolists don't do well when they try to expand into competitive markets.
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The AT&T 6300 was built by Olivetti: quote from Obsolete Computer Museum [obsoleteco...museum.org]:
"Very strangely, most of this computer was actually made in Italy by Olivetti, including the hard drive."
The Olivetti M24 wasn't very remarkable, though I bumped up against several and they shared a similar propensity toward power supply failures.
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But that was PC. Workstations were very big at the time and that's where tech was happening. Sun, SGI, etc. Bell Labs had some SGI machines, the first I saw and I was impressed. Even AT&T's minicomputer solution (3B series) had some problems, I think ours had 2 units with a bandwidth limited bus between them, and it croaked under the weight of a full classroom of students doing homework. Their 3B2 workstations seemed a bit lackluster compared with the competition. I believe some of these were esse
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Having been at the short-lived Computer Systems Group mid-late 80s (just before the NCR acquisition) , I think a lot of the problem was the monopoly mindset where they overthought the R&D part to make boxes they expected to be in service for decades a la central-office equipment, vs consumer-oriented systems with a much shorter lifespan. They also tried to push the same 3B processors used in those central-office switches against the rising tide of x86 and RISC CPUs such as SPARC & PowerPC, so ended
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I always wondered why it didn't become the big tech hub that Silicon Valley became.
Because no one wants to live in New Jersey.
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Not sure why. Once you get out of Neward and the Manhattan overflow, it's a very nice state.
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I always wondered why it didn't become the big tech hub that Silicon Valley became.
Because Bell Labs wasn't good at commercializing the stuff they invented. The tech hubs grew up around the companies that did. There's a good lesson there for us geeks that tend to underestimate the importance of productization and marketing. It takes more than brilliant technology to change the world, you have to actually deliver it to the world, and to do that at scale you have to get the world to pay you for it.
Re:not just internet (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. It's hard to believe the submission didn't mention things like the invention of the solar cell. My father worked on a solar tracking guidance system there circa 1960.
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Invention of the silicon solar cell. The first solar cell was invented in 1883 which is well before Bell Labs was founded. However, the silicon solar cell was a huge step in making them more practical for energy supply.
Re:not just internet (Score:4, Funny)
But why would you need all of Murray Hill for that? Couldn't you just put the box with the flashing light in a display case in the Smithsonian?
Assuming the Elders approve, that is.
Re:not just internet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:not just internet (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a shame for the museum to deal exclusively with the internet. I'd rather see that as a part of a broader museum covering the many areas in which Bell Labs did important work.
This. It would be wiser for each company to consider having a historical record of their specific contributions and impact to the development of the internet.
The history of the automobile can be told from many an auto makers viewpoint to create a proper record for something so all-encompassing. Same applies here.
Re:not just internet (Score:4, Informative)
I guess it would be like the American Equivalent of Bletchley Park. They were doing military stuff for WW2, but a lot of the technology invented there found civilian use after the war.
They also have exhibits for later British inventions that were developed elsewhere, for example Acorn/ARM in Cambridge.
Series of tubes (Score:3)
It would be interesting to see where they keep all the tubes.
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It would be interesting to see where they keep all the tubes.
I heard they're replacing the toilet plumbing with clear PVC in the museum. An artsy-fartsy interactive concept for each museum patron to memorialize that footnote of internet history with a refreshing flush or some shit.
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In the original building around which everything else was built, the men's and ladies' bathrooms are on alternating floors, because when it was built in 1938, the only place there were ladies' rooms at all were where the secretarial and steno pools sat.
When you visit the anechoic chamber, they give you a copy of a Bell Labs recruitment ad featuring the chamber. It explicitly says, "...looking for men with...". It held the unofficial title of the most-copied page of any printed matter in Bell Labs history.
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It would be interesting to see where they keep all the tubes.
No, Bell Labs invented transistors, not tubes.
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Do I really need to explain this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Do I really need to explain a joke?
Bell did not invent all those things. (Score:2)
This is the same kind of stupidity which credits famous actors for lots of inventions, some of which are true, but the rest are not.
If you can't stick to telling the truth, and if you're embarrased Bell didn't REALLY make all that stuff, just don't do an article.
Things the article says Bell did but... it didn't:
Lasers - Hughes research in California
Fiber OIptics - Telefunken research in Germany
Cellular phones - Motorola
Data compression - Shannon [who later went to work for Bell] and Fanno
Artificial Intellig
Re:Bell did not invent all those things. (Score:5, Funny)
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https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fe... [umich.edu]
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When I worked there, Bell Labs was very much opposed to IP networking in general. It was the biggest road sign that there was a limited future for them.
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I
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It's debatable that anyone has really "invented" artificial intelligence yet...
Notch up another kill for Carly Fiorina (Score:5, Interesting)
Carly Fiorina drastically cut Bell Labs when she was CEO of Bell System spinoff Lucent. She went on to clobber HP Labs, as part of butchering Hewlett-Packard. She was fired by HP and has been unemployed ever since.
Re:Notch up another kill for Carly Fiorina (Score:4, Interesting)
She doesn’t need to work. One golden parachute is more than enough to live comfortably and never lift a finger.
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She doesn’t need to work. One golden parachute is more than enough to live comfortably and never lift a finger.
Sure, but at that level it's not about being able to afford a comfortable lifestyle it's about the social status, and in that respect it's likely that her inability to find another comparably high-ranking position stings.
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After killing HP, she tried to kill the Senate (ran for it in 2010). Then she tried to kill the country (ran against Trump in the 2015/16 primaries).
Regarding Murray Hill (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, I remember having a conversation with a co-worker before I left and he told me he had a friend who was from New Jersey, so he asked his friend what to expect. The friend said "There are 2 kinds of places in New Jersey. There are places that are pretty with nothing to do and there are places that are ugly with nothing to do." Murray Hill was the first one. The town had maybe 10000 people living in it I think, but there was nothing there. There was a major brand hotel that I stayed at and the only restaurant in town was a Friendly's. I had to drive in my rental car every night to some neighboring town to get anything to eat. I have no idea what the area is like now, but there's probably no "there" there just like when I was there. I have no objections to the old campus becoming a museum but I just don't know that a lot of people are going to want to go to a nothing town to see it, so any backers will probably need to be prepared for it to need a lot of financial help staying open.
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I don't know where your friend from NJ lived, but by the 1990s there were lots of good-sized towns with plenty to do. Were you surprised that Bell didn't choose a city downtown to place a sprawling research campus?
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Murray Hill was a dry town, so there were only two restaurants, a really bad french joint and a chinese restuarant (and a McDonalds I think). There was a TGIFs nearby in a town that was not dry, that may be what you were thinking of.
Murray Hill itself was pretty wealthy and mostly a suburb to NYC, there's not much reason to be there unless you live there or worked there.
Great to honour Bell Labs (Score:2)
I think it's a wonderful idea to celebrate the scientific and technological contributions that Bell Labs has made. But I would really like to see a significant portion of the effort devoted to illustrating what Bell and its descendants have become. I don't want the modern consumer-facing Bell companies - lying pillaging scum that they are - to benefit from the museum that celebrates the kind of company Bell used to be.
Why not a college campus? (Score:2)
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Schlumberger gave their Austin Hill Country Campus to Concordia College, the Bell Labs facility is much larger and the existing buildings could be dorms as well as classroom space. This huge place full of small spaces would make a lousy museum -- it was the people that made Bell Labs great, not the space. Turn it into a college campus.
Besides, some of the facility was actually torn down [blogspot.com] ten years ago. It's not the same facility that it used to be in the physical sense, either.
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The only problem with making it a college campus is that colleges don't pay much in the way of taxes to the municipality, apparently. I think it might be different if it is a public VS private operation, but the town would probably much prefer if it was kept as a corporation.
Now the question is, what corporation out there would have use for such a facility?
Too narrow a scope for Bell Labs (Score:2)
Yes, the Internet came from tools and concepts developed at Bell Labs - but so much came from Bell Labs that you can actually say that the Internet was only a small part of what Bell Labs contributed to technology. Semiconductors. Lasers. The switched telephone network. Stereo audio recording/playback. Tube TV. Sonar. So much more. There should be a Bell Labs museum, I 100% agree. It should focus on the place and the people and yes, the long list of what they accomplished - including their co
Careful what you wish for (Score:2)
IBM closed their Santa Teresa (in San Jose, California) facility. That's where spinning rust disk drives were invented, among other things. Developers wanted to level the site and build other stuff. Activists were advocating to preserve the buildings as a historical site.
In the middle of that, there was a mysterious fire which burned the building to the ground. I don't think anyone proved (or even had any evidence for) arson but it sure was a convenient coincidence.
more than internet (Score:2)
Bell Labs is waaaayyyyy more than the internet. In fact, Bell Labs did not have much to do with the internet, other than C and Unix, neither of which were the internet. The internet was ARPA, MIT, BBN, SRI, and a few other universities.
Bell Labs was the transistor, compression, lasers, and many other things that were physics-based or mathematical EE.
The building architecture would not be conducive (Score:2)
Has the person with this idea actually visited the Murray Hill site? The buildings tend to consist of very long hallways with a few rooms on each side. From one end to the other is about a ten-minute walk. It's not a good building architecture for a museum.
Perhaps the one museum-worthy part of the campus would be the guard stations on top of buildings that were used to house machine-gun armed guards during WWII.