bell labs

The 404 1,249: Where we get the senior discount (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Ever wondered how Apple employees travel around the Cupertino campus?

- Taking New York's upcoming Citi Bike Share plan for a test ride.

- Why don't cell phones have a dial tone?

- Forget following teens, your new favorite Tweeter is 94 years old.

- Speaking of old people, here's Jeff's dear, old granny with a 404 sticker on her walker.

- Speaking of speaking of old people, here's a soul-cuddling video of an older landlady lip-syncing her favorite song from the 1930s.… Read more

The 404 1,241: Where we rip from the rich and seed to the poor (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- The first call from a cell phone was made 40 years ago today.

- The Verge interviews Marty Cooper, father of the cell phone.

- Recalling 1993: Step back 20 years in NYC's past.

- Catching up with the TV show release group responsible for recording, distributing torrents.… Read more

When Telstar met JFK

When you're watching the London Olympics later this month on your big-screen TV, you probably won't give a second thought to how those images got to you from across the ocean. Hit the Power button on your remote, and presto -- the 4x100 relay, live, and in the moment.

It wasn't always so.

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, watching faraway events as they unfolded was an exotic thing, a rarity marked by the phrase "Live, via satellite." Look back just 50 years, and you'll find the satellite that got it … Read more

The laser turns 50

Fifty years ago Sunday, a Hughes Labs researcher named Theodore Maiman changed the world.

That day, Maiman became the first person on Earth to build a working laser, something that colleagues at a number of other companies and institutions had been feverishly trying to do for months or even years.

Coming out of World War II, explained Hughes Lab veteran and current Raytheon optics and lasers senior principal physicist Daniel Nieuwsma, many people were working with radar and were looking or ways to boost their power.

One method that was tried was using masers, or microwave amplification by stimulation of … Read more

Industry group to apply green touch to telecom

A new industry group is hoping that the same amount of energy now used to power the Internet and other global networks for one day will eventually power them for three years.

Unveiled by its organizer Bell Labs on Monday, the global consortium, dubbed Green Touch, has set a challenging agenda for itself--to plan and demonstrate the necessary technologies to make today's networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today. The group's deadline is 2015, giving it just five years in which to determine and show how to dramatically slash the carbon emissions from all … Read more

How Linux killed SGI (and is poised to kill Sun)

The fact that SGI was acquired by Rackable Systems for the sad sum of $25 million was big news on Wednesday only because most people had forgotten that the company, formerly better known as Silicon Graphics, still existed.

So what killed SGI? In addition to the rise of Nvidia and makers of other graphics chips that ran on cheaper hardware, it was bad choices:

Continuing to stick with its own chips, operating system, and hardware while the rest of the world moved to commodity x86 boxes. The adoption of Intel's Itanium chip, which remains a depressing joke of a product. … Read more

The demise of Bell Labs, a pictorial

Wired is running a photo gallery related to the history of Bell Labs. If I had to pick one word to describe the photos, it would be depressing.

Besides the fact that Bell Labs was one of the greatest innovation companies of all time, I worked in two of the buildings that are part of the photo collection. My first "really real" job was at a Bell Labs start-up based on the Inferno programming language (which was based on Plan 9, a very early open-source OS) that Lucent attempted to commercialize.

I was based in the Murray Hill, … Read more