Comment by lr1970

3 years ago

> 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

1 comment

lr1970

a9h74j 3 years ago

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.