Comment by nindalf
3 years ago
It’s not like Ma Bell had any competitors they could buy, even if they wanted to. Because they were a complete monopoly. And despite this supposed strong anti-monopoly enforcement, they milked that monopoly for decades.
But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.
C, UNIX, radio astronomy, cellular networks, the transistor, integrated circuits, the laser, photovoltaic cells, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, super resolution microscopy, optical tweezers, error-correcting codes, fibre optic networks...
Seriously, when you list it all out it sounds like a reasonable trade.
The question isn't whether those things are nice, it's whether they wouldn't have been developed as fast in a competitive environment.
(Personally, I think just based on human nature that competition is anti-innovative in the long run, but I can't prove anything either way.)
4 replies →
Don't forget S was developed at Bell Labs, the mother of R.
> But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.
And transistor [0], laser [1], CCD image sensor [2] to name a few more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Townes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-coupled_device#History
I heard Townes in a small lecture at Berkeley once. As I recall he described a bit of a struggle getting Bell Labs interested in patenting the maser (or some similar administrative detail). He offered that the key phrase turned out to be: you might be able to use this for communications.
Seems like the early CATV operators would have been an easy target for bell.
bell didn’t spring into existence a monopoly. GP described the conditions that grew bell