<story><title>The rise and fall of the industrial R&amp;D lab</title><url>https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-rd-lab/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amgreg</author><text>Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren&amp;#x27;t worth it for the research they do. It&amp;#x27;s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&amp;amp;T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it&amp;#x27;s just not worth it, so let&amp;#x27;s kill those monopolies.  And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let&amp;#x27;s do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wenc</author><text>&amp;gt; other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money?&lt;p&gt;Bell Labs may not have been able to commercialize all of its discoveries, but &lt;i&gt;humanity&lt;/i&gt; certainly got a lot more than Unix and the transistor. Quote [1]:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, and S. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bell Labs was also a training ground for a great many people who went on to make highly impactful discoveries [2], from Hamming to Bengio.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The rise and fall of the industrial R&amp;D lab</title><url>https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-rd-lab/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amgreg</author><text>Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren&amp;#x27;t worth it for the research they do. It&amp;#x27;s nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&amp;amp;T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it&amp;#x27;s just not worth it, so let&amp;#x27;s kill those monopolies.  And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let&amp;#x27;s do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research.&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;youtu.be&amp;#x2F;zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>criddell</author><text>I just finished reading Mitchell Waldrop&amp;#x27;s book &lt;i&gt;The Dream Machines&lt;/i&gt; which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and it has a lot of stories about the things Metcalfe is talking about during the 60&amp;#x27;s and 70&amp;#x27;s and into the 80&amp;#x27;s. It&amp;#x27;s a long, detailed book and I recommend it.&lt;p&gt;After finishing the book it made me feel like progress has slowed tremendously. Look at the changes from 1960 to 1970 or from 1970 to 1980 and compare that to 2010 to 2020. The last decade produced lots of incremental improvements but where are the giant technological shifts?&lt;p&gt;I was born in 1970 and if I look back over my life, the giant change was going from a non-networked world to a networked world. I think it&amp;#x27;s similar to how my grand parents could remember the world before and after commercial flight or how my great-grandmother remembered the arrival of automobiles.&lt;p&gt;I wonder what it is my kids will point to 40 years from now. A colony on the moon or Mars maybe?</text></comment>