ATT's bell labs generated 9 noble prizes. Per wikipedia Bell Labs developed 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++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL.
Yes, they are broken up, and now the separate baby bells (pac bell etc) I don't remember anything close coming from them.
How many of those computer hardware, operating system, and programming developments occurred after AT&T was barred by its 1956 consent decree in US v. Western Electric (filed in 1947), preventing the company from engaging in information services or entering the computer industry?
On January 14, 1949, the government filed an action in the District Court for the District of New Jersey against the Western Electric Company, Inc.[3] and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Inc. (Civil Action No. 17-49).[4] The complaint alleged that the defendants had monopolized and conspired to restrain trade in the manufacture, distribution, sale, and installation of telephones, telephone apparatus, equipment, materials, and supplies, in violation 136*136 of sections 1, 2, and 3 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2, and 3.[5] The relief sought included the divestiture by AT & T of its stock ownership in Western Electric; termination of exclusive relationships between AT & T and Western Electric; divestiture by Western Electric of its fifty percent interest in Bell Telephone Laboratories;[6] separation of telephone manufacturing from the provision of telephone service; and the compulsory licensing of patents owned by AT & T on a non-discriminatory basis.
ATT maintained exhorbitant long distance pricing which made computer networking prohibitively expensive for everyone but very expensive mainframe users like IBM.
ARPA was required to develop the ARPANET because only a defense agency could bypass the legislative prohibitions that enabled ATT to keep private enterprises from using their lines without permission.
ATT spent decades choking out innovation because their monopoly hold meant their was little incentive for them to improve the product so they didn’t. They sat on lots of innovations that didn’t see the light of day until they were forced into competition. This was the main driver for that monopoly revocation.
Sure, but on the consumer side there was basically nothing. I imagine the person you're replying to was referring to things like Caller ID, Call Waiting, Three-way calling, etc.
Bell Labs wasn't great because of anti-competitive behavior, they were great in spite of it. Are you saying that if we break up Facebook or other anti-competitive mega-corps that we will be missing out on untold innovation?
I am suggesting that innovation can occur both outside of facebook (see tiktok and thousands of other innovations on the internet) and that even inside facebook there may be development and innovation (react? open compute stuff?). Not I don't like or use facebook personally.
The idea that facebook has a monopoly on the internet or innovation seems a stretch to me.
Cassandra, GraphQL, Open Compute, eBPF, Hack/HHVM, Flow, Hadoop (contributor), PyTorch, ARIES, TerraGraph, Presto, React, Jest, rocksdb, folly, Relay, zstd, infer, buck, proxygen, Hermès, tons of NLP research and libraries, pyre, redex, Haxl, osquery, LASER, Kats, phabricator, Thrift (contributor I believe), Nuclide, and so much more.
Let’s separate the company from the technology contributions engineers have made from working there. This list doesn’t even include the HUGE list of startups people have created with inspiration from internal FB tech.
I have plenty of experience with half that list. My statement still stands. You also can't separate the company from the engineers who worked on these projects because they literally funded their development.
Most long-term research comes out of monopolies, which by definition have slack time and money to invest in speculative projects.
(obviously not all monopolies choose to invest this way, but absolutely no companies which live or die by quarterly earnings b/c of market competition can do this)
