Comment by leoc

Pasting my comment on the article https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to... :

> RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of the most important of the American corporate labs with similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... : it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry, in large part because of its roles in the development of the transistor and the LCD and its thirst for patent-licensing money.)

>> In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik argues that by the 1990s PARC was no longer engaged in such unrestricted research decoupled from product development.

> According to Hiltzik and most other sources, the PARC Computer Science Lab's salad days were over as early as 1983, when Bob Taylor was forced to leave, while the work of the other PARC labs focussed on physics and materials science wasn't as notable in the period up to then.

Seriously: if this kind of thing interests you at all, go and read We Were Burning.