Comment by bsb

Having worked at Bell Labs, I gotta say the culture of innovation was paramount best described by this statement of an old supervisor: "You should do what you feel is the right thing, it's my job to align that to the needs of the business." So you might spend weeks researching highly available protocols and data distribution techniques to get the one feature correct. It should be no surprise then that the old refriderator-looking phone systems pioneered in the late 70s and 80s had a well known 5 9's of reliability.