[HN Gopher] Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (2019) ___________________________________________________________________ Bell Labs Holmdel Complex (2019) Author : zdw Score : 56 points Date : 2023-07-15 20:30 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.abandonedamerica.us) (TXT) w3m dump (www.abandonedamerica.us) | myself248 wrote: | And they're tearing down the antenna: | https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/save-big-bang-antenna/ | cycomanic wrote: | The Horn antenna is at Crowford hill not Holmdel (confusing | because they are both in the Holmdel township). | evanelias wrote: | The building is featured prominently in the show Severance as the | hq of Lumon. | anothermoron wrote: | [dead] | Aloha wrote: | Yeah, when I watched the first episode, I was like "oh, shit | thats Holmdel!" | abh123 wrote: | I got my COVID shot there. | bediger4000 wrote: | Bell System buildings are the weirdest. There's art deco stuff | like the St Paul MN central office, or the Mountain States | Telephone and Telegraph building in downtown Denver, which is | worth venturing into the lobby to see murals like "The Wings of | Thought" and "The Crucible of Science" to industrial hulks like | the Minneapolis main central office. There's a data center at | 52nd and Zuni in Denver that's really 1960s. | | Then there's buildings so bland you can walk or drive by and you | won't remember them, like the building at the corner of 15th and | Curtis in Denver. Architectural blind spot. | tomcam wrote: | God, it's painful to see this. So much happened there. I read | about it decades ago and dreamed of working there. | | I ended up working at Microsoft's Building 2, which was just as | good. It was a giant plus sign, lined with individual offices and | nestled in a veritable forest. I worked with some of the greatest | minds in computer science, and they were all kind, helpful, | brilliant people. | | I knew at the time it was special, knew it wouldn't last forever, | and cherished every day there. It's gone too. | st_goliath wrote: | Fascinating to see a couple recent photos and find out what | happened to this place. | | The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex is something that I find myself | unexpectedly stumbling over on the Internet every few years or | so. First time some circa 10 years ago, when they uploaded a 1973 | era training video for the computing services to `AT&T tech | channel`: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMYiktO0D64 | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9aVOIuKVUc | js2 wrote: | Raquel Welch taped up on the System 370: | | https://youtu.be/HMYiktO0D64?t=339 | | I think it's this photo: | | https://imgur.com/a/a0wK4sR | | Her photo is the only personal item I see anywhere in the two | videos. | LegitShady wrote: | its essentially been turned into a funny looking mall since | 2019 | | https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ | zw123456 wrote: | OMG Flashback memories of my internship there. | | It really should be turned into a tech museum or something. | Scubabear68 wrote: | I went to Holmdel High School, and my girlfriend's dad was a | researcher at this facility, he invented a delta wave modulation | technique in the 60's that was (is?) used by NASA for certain | spaceship comms. I got to visit him once or twice here, it was | truly an inspiring building with all of the open air quality and | glass everywhere. | | Really part of another era, where AT&T sunk billions into the | labs just for pure research. If only corporations could be a far | seeing today. | wslh wrote: | I understand they were a cash cow which put the company in | another league where cash flow is anormally high. | etrautmann wrote: | I share the sentiment but there are companies doing this - it's | just in different domains than telephony. Deepmind, OpenAI, | etc, fusion research, SpaceX. There are lots of long bets on | hard tech. If anything it's a proliferation, although Bell labs | is no longer a thing. | | My hope is that we can establish a similar model for biology, | since many challenges in that domain are pre-commercial but not | at the appropriate scale for academic labs. | jcrawfordor wrote: | None of these efforts are as wide-ranging as AT&T's, though. | Budget comparisons are hard for a number of reasons (AT&T had | R&D happening in multiple places, under multiple funding | streams, both directly and indirectly funded), but the usual | thinking is that AT&T spent a larger % of revenue on research | than most, but not all, organizations today, with Google | being a notable example of a company that beats it on % | revenue to R&D (is this still true?). My suspicion would be | that that comparison wouldn't hold if you factored in the | directly funded DoD work but it's hard to say without some | pretty complex digging through accounting records. | | The more substantial point is breadth, though. AT&T research | at its peak was more comparable to a university than an | industrial R&D institution, with both basic and applied | research occurring in a huge variety of fields---likely all | fields of physical science at various points. All of the | organizations you mention are essentially single-purpose. | Some of the major tech companies (Google, Microsoft) are | known for wide-ranging R&D, but they seem to have struggled | to produce the kind of basic advances that AT&T did, and also | seem to be backing off of that work. | | Basic research is the big problem... AT&T had very little | problem with money going to basic research without known | applications, likely due to the substantial influence that | academia and "scientific management" had on AT&T, as well as | its reputation for excellent research management practices | that made AT&T a major part of basic physics research on the | behalf of the DoD for decades (Sandia National Laboratories, | for example, operated by AT&T until relatively recently). In | my opinion, accounts of Bell Labs enormous success, having | made major contributions to nearly every field of | engineering, often focus too much on the excellence of its | staff (which was a factor, although Bell Labs management | practices were not exactly modern), and downplay the role of | AT&T's willingness to fund basic research and ability to find | outside funding for basic research as well. Few modern | organizations seem to be willing to entertain major efforts | in a nascent field of astronomy, for example, on the | assumption that the technical work will lead to useful | engineering knowledge. | | There's a lot out there about the history of Bell Labs, but | its own multi-volume "A History of Engineering and Science in | the Bell System," from the late '70s, does a good job of | covering the incredible breadth and scale of work performed | at Bell Labs. One thing to consider is that costs were quite | a bit lower back then, and so Bell Labs small-looking budget | of $3-5 billion of today's dollars per year translated to a | workforce in the tens of thousands working, during WWII, | 70-hour weeks. A two-day weekend did finally reach most of | the Bell Labs technical staff early in the Cold War. | | Besides, if you read into the history of Bell Labs, you will | recognize vestiges of its bureaucratic structure in most | government and military R&D today. Its influence in | government and military physical research is enormous. | shortrounddev2 wrote: | Fusion isn't a good example. It's not getting anywhere near | the funding it requires. Maybe I've become cynical, but it | seems like all the big new technology products which have | come out in the last decade or two have just been software | products mostly designed to predict human behavior more | accurately to advertise to us. AT&T invented solar panels, | the transistor, radio astronomy, as well as computing | innovations that we're still using today. It's hard to | imagine we'll hold Google, Apple, or Facebook in the same | reverence 100 years from now because they created some | interesting consumer products which distract us for a couple | years before going in the trash to be replaced by the next, | slightly more distracting version | thevania wrote: | sir, i must respectfully disagree - bell labs is still a | thing | | disclaimer - i work there as a senior researcher and we still | do world class research, so pls don't portrait us as a thing | of the past just yet, thx :) | graphviz wrote: | Whether or not AT&T was far-seeing, they had a mandate to | design and deliver universal telephone service, and cost-plus | deal to pay for it, so it made sense to buy nice expensive | things. Even when the mission was fulfilled and the economy | started to restructure the company, it ran along for at least | another 10 or 15 years before the real disruption started (the | 1996 breakup that turned Bell Labs into Lucent). And even then, | the labs contributed fundamental research in machine learning, | quantum computing and databases, to name a few areas. As you | say, that model of large-scale corporate R&D doesn't exist any | more - there's no funding model to support it. | etrautmann wrote: | How do you figure? The model now has been tech companies for | the last 15 years. | treyd wrote: | I can't speak for the previous commenter but it does seem | there is a different character to the research work | happening at FAANG-scale companies (which is still | generally in service of their corporate strategy) vs the | work that happened at Bell Labs back in the day (which was | more abstract and less directly-commercializable). Bell | Labs was more of a large team of brilliant researchers with | ample resources to support their work, and it just had to | be useful to somebody rather than be part of a | product/service that could be sold directly. | shortrounddev2 wrote: | You're right. The invention of the transistor was a | multi-decade effort by scientists working outside of | regular hours, essentially inventing the field of solid | state physics. It's hard to imagine such a technology | coming out of a publicly traded company like Google or | Apple, whose year-to-year or even quarter-to-quarter | behavior is as sensitive to changes in interest rates and | short term market conditions as a balloon in the wind. | Aloha wrote: | The only way this worked when was AT&T had a virtual monopoly | on all telecommunications (design, installation, services, etc) | in the US, and had their rates set using a rate of return | derived pricing mechanism. | | We can probably get such things back, but they are not Free | exactly. | | RCA had similar labs, but I think changes to the tax code makes | them less worthwhile to do today as well. | atleastoptimal wrote: | It's interesting how the area around NYC was the silicon valley | of the mid 20th century. Most of the country's tech innovation | was coming out of Bell and IBM. Has that area's loss of dominance | solely been due to all the tech industry moving to California? | shortrounddev2 wrote: | Tech was present in California in the mid-late 20th century; in | fact, Silicon Valley was founded by an ex-Bell scientist named | Bill Shockley, who shared a Nobel prize for the transistor. His | company didn't do well, but ex-employees founded Fairchild | Semiconductor, whose ex-employees founded Intel. This brought | along many other tech companies, such as Atari, Apple, and the | like. | | Though Bell labs continued to innovate into the 70s and 80s, | the AT&T monopoly was split up, which left Bell Labs with | significantly less cash to invest into pure research with. IBM | also lost the PC wars, ironically even though the PC became the | international default for a microcomputer by the 80s and 90s. | | So, yes, while tech moved west, the existing eastern behemoths | had their own troubles which led to their downfall, independent | of California. At the same time, Stanford became a major hiring | location for these tech companies, and its engineering | departments gained nationwide recognition. Companies moved to | California to get access to Stanford talent. | | Source - The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of | American Innovation by Jon Gertner | rcpt wrote: | It's the building used in the TV show Severance. | | I had a job offer to join Nvidia's office there years ago. Worst | financial decision of my life not taking it. | gttalbot wrote: | Yeah I worked in here for Lucent before the OG dotcom crash. It's | a pretty neat building. When you went in back in those days, | there was a big communication satellite suspended over the entry | lounge, with various things like telephones, transistors, etc., | which were productionized here. IIUC there are antennas on the | property used to discover the Big Bang too. There's also a big | water tower in the shape of a transistor over a reflecting pool. | It was a rough time watching this building emptied out into | dumpsters during Lucent's auguring-in. | cycomanic wrote: | Note that the complex is now Bell Works and quite busy now. There | are a number of tech companies there and importantly Nokia Bell | Labs relocated from Crawford Hill to Bell Works ~2-3 years ago | (this is also the reason why there is talk about dismantling the | Horn Antenna, which is on the Crawford Hill site, which IIRC was | sold recently). | fewald_net wrote: | This building reminds me of one of the ones from the University | of Freiburg, Germany: https://ais.badische- | zeitung.de/piece/07/58/57/cf/123230159-... | | Google: KG 2 Uni Freiburg | keninorlando wrote: | This is now Bell Works: https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ | every wrote: | Nice to look at but I can hear voices, conversions and footsteps | echoing everywhere... | JonasJSchreiber wrote: | I worked there for two years. It's quite beautiful now, a bunch | of companies, and has a Montessori, an escape room, golf | simulator, and a food court. | gfodor wrote: | In high school I worked for Lucent in this building after school | and over summers. It's where I learned UNIX, vim, Perl, and how | web servers worked. It bums me out seeing that it now is | basically a big mall. Hopefully there are some cool startups that | come out of it. | barathr wrote: | Lots of good stuff like this on the author's feed here: | https://mastodon.social/@AbandonedAmerica | rrdharan wrote: | I was an intern here the summer after my sophomore year in | college. I just assumed all office buildings were this epic and | only later realized how fortunate I was. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | I worked here - my first job in the US, via a contracting agency, | for a few weeks until I totalled my then-girlfriend's car, broke | my arm, and could no longer commute from Philadelphia. | | Worst programming job I ever had. My assigned task: change the | constant that limited how many forwarding steps a phone could | follow in one of their private telephone routing systems, from 32 | to 64. That meant: change the macro/definition in a .h file, | update the documentation string. | | Planned time for this change: 1 week. | | There's a reason those telephone switches written in C actually | worked so reliably, but oh god, not the life for me. | | Did I mention the office^H^H^H^H^H^Hcloset I had to work in. | | Very happy to never come close to this vision of programming ever | again. | onecommentman wrote: | (2019), now Bell Works | | https://bell.works/new-jersey/explore/ | lasermatts wrote: | I grew up in Monmouth County and I think back fondly on all the | old Bell Labs folks who stayed in the area. They were my soccer | coaches/math teachers/friendly old folks in the neighborhood, and | it wasn't until I was in high school did I fully understand the | brilliant minds I was lucky enough to learn from. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-16 23:00 UTC)