A History of Science & Engineering in the Bell System: Communications Sciences, 1925-1980

by S. Millman

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0932764061
• ISBN13: 9780932764065
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: A T & T Customer Information Center
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Review of History of Science & Engineering in Bell Labs

This is a well written book that preserves the valuable contributions made by the Bell Laboratories before they were killed by an unbelievably stupid U. S. Congress. Reading the accomplishments of the Laboratories and their contributions to human knowledge and to industry clearly emphasizes the loss to the nation and the world made by punishing AT & T for being prosperous enough and wise enough to establish and fund scientific and engineering research. AT & T's crime apparently was to prosper from the Lab's research and development. Congress was obviously too stupid to understand that is takes money to support research and development. Now that Bell Laboratories is gone all of the scavengers who urged Congress to punish AT & T for being prosperous are too stingy to either individually or together to contribute to a corresponding research and development facility. The book's twelve chapters describe the Bell Systems contributions to the mathematical aspects of communications, acousics in communication, pictures, electronics, radio and waveguide tranmission, use of light in communication, swiching theory, computer science, digitizing, behavioral science, and some aspects of the economics associated with the communication industry. This book is one of a two volume set. The other deals with physical sciences. While the Bell System was not the only contributor to advances in science and engineering it was a major contributor, as evidenced by the number of Nobel Prize winners from the Bell System.

THE bible for telephone network hackers and afficianados

Did you know that remote compting existed in the 1950s? Yup -- Bell Labs was doing it long before MIT created MULTICS, when Bell engineers rigged up remote access to a special purpose engineering computer in a distant city. Of course, they owned the phone lines. ALL the phone lines. So they had resources available to nobody else. Being a monopoly, they also kept this innovation to themselves, leaving another ten years to pass before MIT computer scientist Fernando José Corbató re-invented the technology in 1964. This book describes many Bell System inventions, from microwave communications to the transistor to satellite to digital signal processing to lasers, electronic switching, and Unix. It's all here, in brilliantly vivid (to geeks) prose illlustrated in exquisite detail. All of the history shows how the needs of telecommunications engineering drove research, yielding amazing technical solutions to the industrial problems found in the day-to-day telephone network. The transistor, for example, replaced unreliable vaccuum tubes that were the bane of telephone line signal amplifiers, called repeaters. Microwaves and lasers solved long distance transmission problems. Unix was an operating system designed to facilitate rapid development of the realtime processing required in electronic phone switches. An unintended subtext of the book is to reveal the power of a monopoly in artificially constraining technology. The paternal attitude of The Phone Company ensured that end users of the network saw minimal innovation in their phone instruments. The single most extravagant end user improvement was the touch tone phone, delivered reluctantly by Bell in the 1970s despite the technolgy being available for at least the prior ten years. Bell fought its breakup viciously, prediting all manner of dire consequences. What actually resulted, of course, was the telecommmunication revolution that delivered cellphones, the Internet, and fee long distance. Alas, with recent mergers and acquisitions, Ma Bell seems to be re-coagulating, like the alien creature in the movie The Thing. I expect at any moment to once again see TV ads with that stark bell-shape-in-a-circle logo above the resistance-is-futile "The Bell System" subtitle. This book is a collector's item.