The title of this post was coined by Arthur C. Clarke to describe the famed Bell Laboratories facility at Murray Hill, New Jersey. If you’re in the software industry and like me, you probably think of Bell Labs as the birthplace of Unix and everything that went with it but the Labs were much, much more. The Computing Science Research Center was actually a small part of the labs.
Most Irreal readers will remember that the transistor was invented at the Labs but there were many other important breakthroughs including the Laser, radio astronomy, cellular and satellite communications, and that thing called Unix. During its heyday, lab researchers earned 10 Nobel Prizes, 5 Turing awards, and more than 20,000 patents.
I have always felt that the Labs would be the ideal place to work. Take a look at this Computerphile video with Brian Kernighan to see what I mean. It’s hard to imagine a better work environment. At least for me.
In a real sense the Labs have been dead for some time and now, in a bittersweet moment, they are abandoning their Murray Hill facility. They’re currently owned by Nokia who is moving the Labs to a new headquarters, called The HELIX Innovation Center, in New Brunswick. NJ.com has a nice article about the Labs and their history. It even has the iconic picture of Thompson and Ritchie working at their PDP-11, although Unix is barely mentioned in the article.
If your heart warms at the idea of Bell Labs and all it meant, be sure to give the article a look. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.