The Idea Factory | Jon Gertner | Talks at Google

[@navskygupta5311]

The book is awesome Jon; it's great to see you in person talking

[@antoniocruz-et1ih]

Another person, Robert C. Pike.. "He is best known for his work on the Go programming language and at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language." ... "He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike is the sole inventor named in AT&T's US patent 4,555,775 or "backing store patent" that is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first software patents."

[@antoniocruz-et1ih]

Another person, Ken Thompson, "hired by Bell Labs in 1966. In the 1960s at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system."..."worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system."

[@antoniocruz-et1ih]

At 31:40, there is a male #3 that indicates many of us from Bell Labs wound up at Google. I don't know that guy, but was interested in the Computer Sciences book that the author planned to write. The Computer Sciences Research Department was located in the Murray Hill location of building 2. It seems when AT&T was broken down in 1996, (AT&T, Lucent, NCR) that location became Lucent Technologies. I read that some changes occurred as eventually there was this Shannon Labs of AT&T for computer sciences. I read Rob Pike left AT&T to Google in 2002 so that might have been his path from Lucent to AT&T prior or just used the historical latter association.

[@antoniocruz-et1ih]

Another person, Eric Schmidt, Ex-AT&T Bell Labs Computer Scientist and Former Google CEO discusses AI Agent and future programming language ideas with AI in September 2024. Eric Schmidt: "At Bell Labs he coded UNIX's lexical-analysis program Lex before moving on to executive roles at Sun Microsystems." (1997 to 2001, he was chief executive officer (CEO) of Novell) and was CEO at Google or Executive Chairman & Technical Advisor at Alphabet."

[@antoniocruz-et1ih]

An article in January 2024, titled, "Bell Labs & Google: bookends of the same sad story?" discussed how some Google employees might have déjà vu that Google is going a similar path to what Bell Labs occurred with innovation. Especially for former employees of Bell Labs that are at Google as quoted, "Quite a few worked at Bell Labs. Occasionally, they shared their stories of corporate mediocrity, meekness, and lack of vision. A few of them left Bell Labs to join Google."

[@antoniocruz-et1ih]

Male #3 joined in 1981 as he states 33:24 and stated Bell Labs News.

[@MrRandyScot]

Jon, why did you exclude my father, Dr Kenneth G McKay, from your book on Bell Labs??

[@secondEpiphany]

works fine for me. so i think it's just you. Also the really amazing part comes after the 5min mark :P

[@BrianFedirko]

Gr8

[@mariterodriguez5349]

🥰

[@TheCaptain14]

Fantastic author, less than exciting orator.