100 years of Bell Labs [pdf]

As a newly landed immigrant to the US I worked at Bell Labs in Naperville IL for most of the decade of the 1980s and I have a few fun memories mostly of extra-curricular stuff.

There was a Unix version of the popular Aliens video game built with curses and played on 9600 baud terminals and when the Pacman video game came out I hacked the Aliens code to play it. Initially I had the monsters represented by 'M' until the player hit the appropriate button that made them run away instead when I changed the character for the monsters to 'W' for wimp. This ran afoul of the affirmative action police as it suggested superiority of 'M'en over 'W'omen so I hastily changed 'W' to 'S'.

Another time there was a paper airplane contest where the planes were launched from the 4th floor walkway into the atrium of the Indian Hill West building. There were prizes for the longest distance flight, longest time flight, fastest plane and most beautiful flight. I won the latter with a helicopter-like plane that just spun its way slowly to the floor.

The best talk I remember giving was one explaining the game of cricket that took a full hour, and as for work contributions I can only remember coming up with the idea to use the geometric mean to summarize benchmark results.

PS one more - my first US code review I spent about 30 mins explaining how my code worked with few if any questions from the other participants. Finally I asked if there were any other questions when someone hesitantly said - "Yes, what is this variable "zed" that you keep talking about?"

This is a fun read, and, unlike a lot of material on the Labs, goes back a lot further than 1947.

As a software engineer, my favorite book on the topic is "Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan. It tells many of the same stories that are told elsewhere about the modern history of the Labs, but through the first-person perspective of someone who was there, for whom the characters are not just historical figures, but friends.

TIL that Harvey Fletcher (who I knew from his acoustic/audio work, particularly the Fletcher-Munson loudness curve) contributed to the Millikan oildrop experiment. Thanks!

Another great resource for understanding what went on at Bell Labs is Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Engineering: Learning to Learn"