Thank you for sharing this article; this changed some of my perceptions of Bell Labs regarding how free its researchers were, though Bell Labs was certainly one of the most free industrial research labs in history, alongside 1970s-era Xerox PARC.
The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems.
Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.
The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems.
Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.