Discovery.

 

One of the Bell Labs' Nobel Prizes was to Penzias and Wilson for their measurements of the background microwave radiation from the Big Bang. It's hard to describe how fundamentally this measurement revolutionized both astrophysics and our basic understanding of the universe. More than you ever might want to know about this is here.

 

that was one upside of the benevolent monopoly concept.
they had huge amounts of money to invest in technology even if it never came to fruition.

 

...of course, one might ask where those huge amounts on money to invest in technology came from.

Remember when "Ma Bell" was a monopoly? HPH

 

I really meant to italicize benevolent.

 

Yes, there were 6000. There may have been at least 1500 PhD in the building and almost all engineers had master's degrees. There were also two satellite locations in the immediate vicinity.

What looks like one building was actually four buildings under the same roof. They were on a common basement floor that housed the auditorium, machine shops, stockroom (sometimes called the gift shop), the anechoic chamber and other service facilities. The buildings were connected by the two elevator towers and by balconies. All offices and labs were windowless except for those for occupants at the vice-presidential level.

There was a large cafeteria and service dining rooms, a small shop, bank and credit union. There were large atriums between the buildings

You could decorate your office to some extent. Note the clean desk

 

But the success rate was very high. The problem was not that the money was wasted. A very high percentage of the basis of current solid state technology came from Bell Labs. Unix is the basis of Linux and is also what underlies the Mac OS.

Here are some others: Sound motion pictures, high fidelity, the first TV transmission, the touch-tone dial, cellular telephony, basic research on speech including the perceptual coding used in MPEG and many other scientific and engineering advances.

One advantage of thhe monopoly environment and at the same time a problem was the lack of competitive pressure. Things were brought to market whenever AT&T decided to do it, often based on whether the previous generation of equipment had been depreciated. Electronic network switches could have been introduced much earlier for example.

Because AT&T's allowed earnings were based on the value of the facilities embedded in the network and auxiliary equipment, including the telephone sets, everything was built to be very durable. Just compare an old telephone set with one of current vintage. The modern set can do a lot more, but you can throw the old set across the rrom and it will still work.

Everything in the old AT&T network was controlled en-to-end. That used to be the only way you could build a 99.99% reliable network. AT&T was broken up when it was realized that this was no longer true.

 

Just curious - were Bell labs and Xerox PARC contemporaries? Competitors? Collaborators?

 

Best thread in a long time!

 

It looks like you already got the answer you needed, but I'll throw in my two cents worth ...

If your father is pickey about his audio, then he might want to consider using his old turntable, and a software package called DART (Digital Audio Restoration Technology). If he's not so picky, he'd probably be satisfied with the ION.

I actually have DART plus two "exotic" turntables, and an ION. I use the ION for digitizing recordings that predate the RIAA, and it's more than good enough for that kind of transfer. Using the ION is so easy, a caveman could do it.