Bell Labs
Latest
Hitting the Books: How Bell Labs jump-started the multimedia art movement
Like [Frank J.] Malina and Klüver, Pierce’s interests extended far beyond engineering. Pierce proved remarkably tolerant of Klüver’s art-and-technology efforts, seeing these as activities that could benefit engineers as well as artists.
Moore's Law in action: making our machines ever more micro
Over the past few decades, engineers have leveraged Moore's Law to the fullest, resulting in powerful ultrathin laptops and feature-rich miniature wearables. Back in 1981, a 23-pound Osborne 1 computer was considered portable, with 64KB of onboard memory. Today, smartphones weigh just a few ounces and easily pack 128GB of storage. There's also a vastly more complex architecture of circuits and sensors inside these devices, all at a scale nearly invisible to the eye. It's taken us decades to develop and shrink down these microelectronics to where they are today, which is no small feat. Join us as we ride the ever-shrinking gadget wave from its early days to some of the nanoscopic creations at work today.
Max Mathews' one-man electronic orchestra
Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. Conduct an electronic orchestra, right from your living room! It may seem like a fever dream headline from the 1950s, but the physical results of Max Mathews' years of work in computer music wouldn't fully materialize until the '80s. His Radio Drum (aka Radio Baton) -- although a continual work-in-progress -- was a groundbreaking method of controlling computer-synthesized sound through a predominantly wireless three-dimensional interface. Many of its unique abilities were courtesy of technological visionary Bob Boie's capacitance research, creating "a much more participatory way of enjoying music," as Mathews described in Stanford University's Brainstorm. The Radio Drum could track surface hits and even hovering positions, and use that data to control a multitude of audio parameters. It was one of many projects that Mathews worked on during his lifetime and played a part in earning him the honorary title of "Father of Computer Music."
Meet your desktop's ancestors: AT&T exhumes footage of the Bell Blit (video)
AT&T's video archives are rich seams of juicy historical tidbits, and today's offering is a fine example. It's sharing footage of the Bell Blit, a graphic interface that Bell Labs developed after being inspired by the Xerox Alto. Originally named the Jerq, it was created by Rob Pike and Bart Locanthi to have the same usability as the Alto, but with "the processing power of a 1981 computer." Watch, as the narrator marvels at being able to use multiple windows at once, playing Asteroids while his debugging software runs in the background on that futuristic green-and-black display. The next time we get annoyed that Crysis isn't running as fast as you'd like it to, just remember how bad the geeks of yesteryear had it.
Engadget Primed: digital audio basics
Primed goes in-depth on the technobabble you hear on Engadget every day -- we dig deep into each topic's history and how it benefits our lives. You can follow the series here. Looking to suggest a piece of technology for us to break down? Drop us a line at primed *at* engadget *dawt* com. Digital audio. There's a very good chance that you've enjoyed some today. It's one of the more universal aspects of technology. In fact, perhaps the more relevant question would be, when was the last time you listened to an analog format? The truth, for many, will be quite some time ago -- vinyl purists and the odd cassette fanatic aside. Yet, despite its ubiquity, there's a lot of misunderstanding and confusion about digital audio. Some believe it'll never match analog for true fidelity, some assert quite the opposite. Many lament the lack of a tactile format, while others love the portability that comes with zeros and ones. In this installment of Primed, we take a look at the history of digital sound, as well as provide an introduction to some of its key components, with the view to helping us understand it better. Wondering what bitrate to encode your MP3s at? Or whether you should choose a 96 or 44.1KHz sample rate? We thought as much. By the time we're through, these questions should no longer lay heavy on your mind, and you can enjoy that latest Knife Party, or Britney track as much as its bit depth allows. What's bit depth you say? Well, read on to find out...
July 12th, 1962: the day two continents smiled at each other
We'd probably all agree the Internet is the real revolution of the modern era, but today marks an older, parallel milestone that also brims with significance. On July 10th, 1962 -- back when JFK fretted over Russian missiles in Cuba and Bob Dylan sang In My Time of Dying -- NASA pelted the Telstar 1 satellite out into orbit, following a team effort by AT&T, Bell Labs and the British and French post offices. Two days later, the world's first transatlantic TV signal made its way from Maine to Brittany, via a quick stop-over in the heavens, and a new age of international communication was born. Kennedy forgot his troubles for a moment to tidy his hair and grin at France, who replied with a chirpy performance by Yves Montand. It didn't last long: Telstar 1 gave up its spherical ghost after just a few months and 400 transmissions, but by then, of course, the message had been delivered.
AT&T unearths Jim Henson's 1963 Robot short for Bell
AT&T has released some real gems from its videos archives over the past year, but it's truly outdone itself this week. It's dug up a rarely-seen short film titled Robot that Jim Henson made for Bell in 1963, which was intended to explain computers and data communications to business owners at "elite seminars." It does so with phrases like "Correction: the machine does not have a soul. It has no bothersome emotions. While mere mortals wallow in a sea of emotionalism, the machine is busy digesting vast oceans of information in a single, all-encompassing gulp." Enjoy.
Dennis Ritchie, pioneer of C programming language and Unix, reported dead at age 70
We're getting reports today that Dennis Ritchie, the man who created the C programming language and spearheaded the development of Unix, has died at the age of 70. The sad news was first reported by Rob Pike, a Google engineer and former colleague of Ritchie's, who confirmed via Google+ that the computer scientist passed away over the weekend, after a long battle with an unspecified illness. Ritchie's illustrious career began in 1967, when he joined Bell Labs just one year before receiving a PhD in physics from Harvard University. It didn't take long, however, for the Bronxville, NY native to have a major impact upon computer science. In 1969, he helped develop the Unix operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and other Bell colleagues. At around the same time, he began laying the groundwork for what would become the C programming language -- a framework he and co-author Kernighan would later explain in their seminal 1978 book, The C Programming Language. Ritchie went on to earn several awards on the strength of these accomplishments, including the Turing Award in 1983, election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999. The precise circumstances surrounding his death are unclear at the moment, though news of his passing has already elicited an outpouring of tributes and remembrance for the man known to many as dmr (his e-mail address at Bell Labs). "He was a quiet and mostly private man," Pike wrote his brief post, "but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind."
The Thinking Machines flashes back to 1968 for a lesson in computer logic, sideburns (video)
Another dusty gem's emerged from the vintage gold mine that is AT&T's Tech Channel archive, and this one's packed full of useful information and some classic Jetsons-style animation. The Thinking Machines pits man against computer to explain how the things reason, and it does so with a soundtrack that's straight out of, well, 1968. Unsurprisingly, the film's populated by giant, button-laden switchboards, early computer graphics, ladies sporting beehives, and gents rocking unfortunate facial hair, but if that doesn't do it for you, it also offers genuine pearls like this: "Best of all, they never get bored. Like other machines, they can do the same monotonous chores all day long without complaining." Someone should tell that to the disgruntled Roomba residing in our hall closet. Check out the full video in all its dated glory after the break.
AT&T opens up video archives, shares the history inside
Where can you find Orson Welles, Marconi's daughter, Alexander Graham Bell's grandaughter, and inventors of the transistor and television? You might try To Communicate is the Beginning, a 1976 educational publication tracing the history of electronic communication, which AT&T recently decided to exhume from its archives of Bell Labs material. The 30-minute video's just the first in a series, too, as AT&T's website is already playing host to films about the origins of the laser and integrated circuit too, with more on the way. Find them all at our source link -- you do want to know how your favorite technologies evolved, right?
Bell Labs spearheads Green Touch initiative to improve network energy efficiency
Normally we might not cover the formation of a new consortium with ridiculously lofty goals like this, but check it: Bell Labs has managed to corral a who's-who of carriers, universities, government agencies, and industry labs with the goal of making communications networks more energy efficient than they are today. What makes the goal so lofty, though, is the fact that Bell wants to improve efficiency by a whopping 1,000 times -- a number it says should be possible based on research it has done suggesting a 10,000-fold improvement is theoretically possible. Heavy-hitting members include China Mobile (the world's largest carrier), AT&T, Swisscom, Telefonica, MIT, Stanford, Freescale, and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, so we're feeling good about the plausibility of Green Touch's first proposed milestone: a reference architecture and sample components within five years capable of meeting the 1,000-fold improvement mark. The group's first meeting is next month -- just be sure to drive your plug-in hybrids to the gathering, guys.
Nobel Prize in Physics shared by CCD inventors, fiber optics pioneer
It's not every year that the Nobel Prize in Physics falls within our scope of coverage, but this year turned out to a big exception, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has deemed it fit to recognize two breakthroughs in the fiber optics and digital photography. The first of those (and half of the $1.4 million prize) goes to Charles K. Kao, whose work in the mid-60s getting light to travel long distances through glass strands made the fiber optic cables we have today possible. The second half of the prize is divided between Canadian Willard S. Boyle and American George E. Smith, who both worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and invented the so-called charge-coupled device semiconductor, better known to anyone that has ever looked at a digital camera spec list as a CCD.[Image courtesy Nobelprize.org]
Bell Labs uses 155 lasers to beam ridiculous amounts of data over 7,000 kilometers
Let's say you have a monumental collection of data at your place. Like, say, everything ever posted to the Pirate Bay. And let's say the Feds are beating down your door and you need to dump that data to a secure off-site storage facility right now. Who do you call? A lawyer, of course, because currently there's no practical way to do such a thing. But, in the not too distant future you might call up Bell Labs, a company whose scientists managed a monumental 100 Petabits per second per kilometer transmission rate using 155 lasers at different optical frequencies. If you take distance out of the equation you're looking at 15.5 Terabits per second, more than ten times faster than the last laser transmission test we reported on. Naturally, this was conducted in conditions that don't quite equate to the real world at large, and it's going to be a long time before we have fiber pipes like that beaming data into our homes. So, hands up chum, and make that one call count.
Developer to raze Bell Labs Holmdel facility, birthplace of the cellphone
It's not very often that we here at Engadget adopt an issue and stand behind it; one of the only notable examples includes the Broadcast Flag, which in 2004 -- very early on in its life -- we made our feelings pretty well known. But when one Joseph Ferrara emailed us to point out a New York Times story that slipped beneath just about everybody's radar, we knew we had to look further into the matter. After all, it shouldn't surprise you that we wouldn't take it lightly when someone threatens to raze the birthplace of the cellphone. The facility in question, one time Holmdel, New Jersey home to Bell Labs -- one of the most prolific technology innovators of the 20th century -- was owned by Lucent technologies until a recent round of asset liquidations. Barely 40 miles out of New York City, in its heydey the six-story, two million square foot campus employed over 5,600 people; it became home to the work of numerous Nobel laureates, and has long since been cemented in the annals of tech history as the birthplace to some of the most important and groundbreaking communications technologies ever conceived. And it'll soon be torn down. Designed and erected between 1957 and 1962 by the legendary Eero Saarinen, Holmdel is former home to Bell Labs' optical transmission, microwave, and wireless work, including the High-Speed Networks Research Department, High Speed Mobile Data Research Department, and Data Networking Systems Research Department. It was Holmdel's Wireless Research Laboratory, however, and the work Richard Frenkiel and Joel Engel that ranks among all Bell Labs' most notable contributions. In the early sixties Frenkeil and Engeld led a team of over 200 engineers to develop the first cellular wireless voice transmission technology, and eventually created AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System), the first and one of the most widely deployed cellphone technologies (still active even today in many parts of rural America). Holmdel is effectively the birthplace of global wireless movement, possibly the most crucial communications development of the 20th century, the internet notwithstanding. But there's more. Lots more.
