I joined the Network Planning Division at Bell Labs Holmdel in 1968, shortly after Buildings 3 and 4 were opened. I stayed until 1987, three years after the official breakup of the Bell System. One of the highlights of my time there was going skiing with Arno Penzias.
My grandfather Ernest Radlein was an electrical engineer working at the mammoth Western Electric facility in Kearney NJ. He helped develop the updated switchboards and state of the art switching systems that were coming about from 1939 to 1941. He and his team probalbly interfaced with Bell Labs on several systems and telecom projects and products, including phones.
1978 was the year I started at Western Electric Allentown Works. I visited Holmdel a few times in my 15 years with the Bell System. What is really ironic is that now part of the former Western Electric facility in Allentown has an unemployment office in it.
The biggest mistake the US government has ever made was the breakup of the Bell system in a way that killed the best R&D facility the world has ever seen. As a former member of the technical staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ, it was a sad day indeed when the Justice department, broke Bell without regards on how to preserve the premiere R&D institution ever created.
It was not the break up of the Bell Labs that was the problem. It was the greediness and narrow mindedness of the MBAs in suits that subsequently started running the place and ultimately trashed it. I’m speaking primarily of people like Rich McGinn and Carly Fiorina who attempted to turn Lucent into … a bank!?!? That didn’t work out too well.
It probably would have died anyway. Nothing lasts forever. Advances in technology became more and more decentralized. Building bigger and bigger buildings in the same locations might have worked in the 50's - 70's, but not now.
@@roachtoasties MIT is still around. So are Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkley, UCLA, U Chicago, U Illinois, Harvard, Yale and others. Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages C, C++, and S among other important developments. This resulted in nine Nobel Prizes and nine Turing awards being won for work done at Bell Labs. Because of greed, stupidity and ideological hubris, Bell Labs is now owned by Nokia of Finland and is barely a shadow of its former self. Thanks to this abject stupidity, the US is no longer a leader in the development of telecommunications technology and is completely dependent upon Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), both second rate foreign companies that are getting blown away by Huawei. Huawei now owns most of the important patents that are essential for 5G and 6G and is now the undisputed leader in telecommunications technology. There was nothing inevitable about the demise of AT&T Bell Labs. It happened because of self inflicted stupidity and corporate greed driven by the false ideology of neo-liberal economics.
Didn't even break up the so called monopoly. The natural monopoly was in the last mile from the serving office to the home, not the partition between local and long distance. The BOCs became the new government sanctioned monopoly. Guess who had the most political clout.
The part of Bell Labs that went with AT&T is still going strong. Now known as AT&T Labs. There are many projects ongoing now. The roll out of the new all digital 9-1-1 network ESINet. New mobile technologies and new video delivery systems along with development of a worldwide cloud based computer network. I have been a Bell System Employee and now AT&T for over 40 years and still working in the Labs.
The part of Bell Labs that stayed with ATT was very small. The majority of the Bell Labs spun off as part of Lucent Technologies in ‘96. This included Holmdel Labs and all of the lab locations mentioned in this video. The demise of Lucent can be credited to Rich McGinn and his management team. We were kicking ass and taking numbers, while he was taking future revenue as current,cooking the books. Around ‘98 - ‘99 the market capitalization of Lucent was $450B. They had just acquired Paradyne for $36B and were talking about purchasing Cisco. If they had…there would no longer be a Cisco, as there is no longer Paradyne and all of the other companies Lucent acquired. I went with the Avaya (Enterprise Communication Division) spin-off from Lucent.
@@tomservo5007 How many more would have jobs? How many more things would be made in the USA even now? It could've been handled differently. Breakup was a monumentally bad idea with catastrophic results to the USA.
@@wakkowarner4288 "How many more things would be made in the USA even now", Manufacturing jobs disappearing isn't a mystery, it's a stage in capitalism.
July 2020: YES it was. ...and like all things UA-cam these days... "do you have a license for that?" LOL - I suppose AT&T has the clout and purchased accordingly. :)
I remember getting lost in this building when I was about 4 or 5. I was looking for a giant candy cane in someone’s office. Eventually I found the security officers and they notified my parents. 😂😂😂
For some reason that candy cane story is well known in that building. Your image was sent of a candy cane for you to not find but what steps a child’s mind will wonder and adapt since this buildings size to a five year old will be 3 times larger to accommodate adult size for simulation in 2006. We perfectly left in 06, 12, and past dec 20. Your sky is actually silk from AI/ Africa. Spiders that make the strongest web that holds 4 times our weight but only at weeks a times than from 3am -4am every night bluebeam arm structure is a hairlike camera shot down through shock light laser (just like war of worlds) from drones that land on your house roof to place metal liquid through drilled hole. Hairlike camera is attracted to vibration esp mainly looking for people and they are sleeping keeping logs to have a look at what % can work night and we can change night and day with in 30 seconds and you’ll hardly notice. We don’t stop time but we bend light along with time which was discovered on north and south axis poles. Hence, we bent time and that candy cane is bent to show double helix white n red cells. When I was 5 I think. My test was, bazooka bubble gum and i unknowingly stole it. From the quote “some people can unlock the secrets of the universe by reading the back of a bubblegum wrapper. “ lex Luther - who’s favorite quote was also the person who invented virtual simulation in movie ready player one.
Theres mansions built all around the building and they turned it into a town center type business. Bars, restaurants, and a library. I was there the other day, its pretty cool.
@@nathanjustus6659, it wasn’t ATT…. ATT spun Lucent Technologies off in ‘96. Lucent included all of the former Western Electric manufacturing facilities, e.g. Omaha Works, Denver Work, Shreveport Works, etc. it also included the vast majority of Bell Laboratories, 125k employees and a hell of a bright future. That fker Rich McGinn, the CEO of Lucent screwed the pooch misstating earnings and drove the stock down from $75 per share to .05. I’d kick his ass if I ever saw him again!! We were all making 6 figures + and sales were strong. He allowed some very large enterprise customers to take delivery of large PBX systems and optical central office switching equipment, while not paying for it for from 5-10 years. However, he took the revenue and reported it. Unbelievable!
I was only 14 in 1984 so I don’t remember much about ATT before then. But I do know how much changed after. For one you no longer had to rent a phone from the company. And over time long distance calls no longer cost 6 dollars a minute. International calls too. Prices dropped big time. Without the breakup I don’t think we’d have mobile phones today like we do. That’s why monopolies are a bad thing, among other things.
Wow, so true - Deregulation - I remember my dad buying his first $9.99 home phone NOT from ATT. The chirpy kind with frazzling piezoelectric ringer. LOL
Those pictures and my memories make me cry. I started at Holmdel in 1984 as a contracted tech to the ISN project - Information Systems Network - the commercial son of Datakit. I ended up back at Holmdel with Lucent in 1999 as an MTS. The library gone, plants dead, and the glass elevator not working. It was almost a relief to be laid off in 2002. A reminder that the works of man are ephemeral.
That building is now Costco’s first own university. My babysitter got her law degree there back when. 25 year anniversary of higher education at Costco and sister Kirkland schools are on the rise. Just like there high rise apartments coming soon!
Haha I send in screen plays to see if people find it so odd it cant be true. But the real on is very spooky. 29 palms is old costco till 2011 when they movedb200 miles to arizona. Pqlm springs was winter retreat for every costco worker in the midwest for 4 day vacation. Costco owns lots of land and has ties with the militaryvl famikes in the area. Kid you not it was likeba whole tiwn in one building bigger than staples center
Родные мои, вы определенно издеваетесь над зрителями, выкладывая видео в настолько низком разрешении. Ау, проснитесь, на дворе не 1920-е годы, когда практиковали механическое ТВ, и даже не 80-е, когда массово использовали VHS. Уже телевизоры в 4k начали массово появляться в наших домах, а они все еще выкладывают видео в 144p. За что вы так с нами?
This documentary was compiled/published in 1982, probably using materials shot even earlier than that. In that era, US TV was still standard resolution called NTSC.
When I think of American ingenuity, Bell Labs is one of the first names I think of. So many great discoveries and advances were made there
I joined the Network Planning Division at Bell Labs Holmdel in 1968, shortly after Buildings 3 and 4 were opened. I stayed until 1987, three years after the official breakup of the Bell System. One of the highlights of my time there was going skiing with Arno Penzias.
I grew up on American Way in Holmdel, NJ. I will always be proud of Bell Labs! Sooooo many great accomplishments at that great facility!
My grandfather Ernest Radlein was an electrical engineer working at the mammoth Western Electric facility in Kearney NJ. He helped develop the updated switchboards and state of the art switching systems that were coming about from 1939 to 1941. He and his team probalbly interfaced with Bell Labs on several systems and telecom projects and products, including phones.
What a man!
1978 was the year I started at Western Electric Allentown Works. I visited Holmdel a few times in my 15 years with the Bell System. What is really ironic is that now part of the former Western Electric facility in Allentown has an unemployment office in it.
I guess they’ll need that office since bell left 😢
The biggest mistake the US government has ever made was the breakup of the Bell system in a way that killed the best R&D facility the world has ever seen.
As a former member of the technical staff at Bell Labs, Murray Hill NJ, it was a sad day indeed when the Justice department, broke Bell without regards on how to preserve the premiere R&D institution ever created.
It was not the break up of the Bell Labs that was the problem. It was the greediness and narrow mindedness of the MBAs in suits that subsequently started running the place and ultimately trashed it. I’m speaking primarily of people like Rich McGinn and Carly Fiorina who attempted to turn Lucent into … a bank!?!? That didn’t work out too well.
It probably would have died anyway. Nothing lasts forever. Advances in technology became more and more decentralized. Building bigger and bigger buildings in the same locations might have worked in the 50's - 70's, but not now.
@@roachtoasties
MIT is still around. So are Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkley, UCLA, U Chicago, U Illinois, Harvard, Yale and others.
Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages C, C++, and S among other important developments. This resulted in nine Nobel Prizes and nine Turing awards being won for work done at Bell Labs.
Because of greed, stupidity and ideological hubris, Bell Labs is now owned by Nokia of Finland and is barely a shadow of its former self.
Thanks to this abject stupidity, the US is no longer a leader in the development of telecommunications technology and is completely dependent upon Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden), both second rate foreign companies that are getting blown away by Huawei. Huawei now owns most of the important patents that are essential for 5G and 6G and is now the undisputed leader in telecommunications technology.
There was nothing inevitable about the demise of AT&T Bell Labs. It happened because of self inflicted stupidity and corporate greed driven by the false ideology of neo-liberal economics.
Didn't even break up the so called monopoly. The natural monopoly was in the last mile from the serving office to the home, not the partition between local and long distance. The BOCs became the new government sanctioned monopoly. Guess who had the most political clout.
Severance brought me here
The part of Bell Labs that went with AT&T is still going strong. Now known as AT&T Labs. There are many projects ongoing now. The roll out of the new all digital 9-1-1 network ESINet.
New mobile technologies and new video delivery systems along with development of a worldwide cloud based computer network. I have been a Bell System Employee and now AT&T for over 40 years and still working in the Labs.
The part of Bell Labs that stayed with ATT was very small. The majority of the Bell Labs spun off as part of Lucent Technologies in ‘96. This included Holmdel Labs and all of the lab locations mentioned in this video.
The demise of Lucent can be credited to Rich McGinn and his management team. We were kicking ass and taking numbers, while he was taking future revenue as current,cooking the books. Around ‘98 - ‘99 the market capitalization of Lucent was $450B. They had just acquired Paradyne for $36B and were talking about purchasing Cisco. If they had…there would no longer be a Cisco, as there is no longer Paradyne and all of the other companies Lucent acquired.
I went with the Avaya (Enterprise Communication Division) spin-off from Lucent.
@@martylucas8557 Yes and the ill fated acquisition of Ascend Communications because ATM (another tragic mistake :) ) switches were the future.
I myself was a 24 year employee of AT&T.
Ken Thompson at 9:48
P.S: what is that catchy music used from minute 8:28 to 10:28?
nice catch!
One can only imagine what might have been if bell labs was not taken over by Wall Street.
you would still be paying a ridiculously high phone bill for equipment you are leasing. Competition is good.
It was the. derequlation that made the change and brought competition and lower prices.
I was an engineer there in 1982-1984. It was a greatest place to work, but that's because Bell was so inefficient being a regulated monopoly
@@tomservo5007 How many more would have jobs? How many more things would be made in the USA even now? It could've been handled differently. Breakup was a monumentally bad idea with catastrophic results to the USA.
@@wakkowarner4288 "How many more things would be made in the USA even now", Manufacturing jobs disappearing isn't a mystery, it's a stage in capitalism.
It's like the opening music was partially borrowed from "Chariots of Fire" by Vangelis, or maybe not?
July 2020: YES it was. ...and like all things UA-cam these days... "do you have a license for that?" LOL - I suppose AT&T has the clout and purchased accordingly. :)
FIVE QUESTIONS! Now, I know you're sleepy, but I just bet it'll make you feel right as rain?
Almost kind of sad it became a mall. This building should be a museum!
I lived in Ho kneel, dad worked in this building, in the 70's 5000 people worked in this building.
Officially Holmdel's population was less then 5000
Beautiful thank you Raph
At about 13:00 I was expecting to hear the theme of "Chariots of Fire" (1981)
I remember getting lost in this building when I was about 4 or 5. I was looking for a giant candy cane in someone’s office. Eventually I found the security officers and they notified my parents. 😂😂😂
For some reason that candy cane story is well known in that building. Your image was sent of a candy cane for you to not find but what steps a child’s mind will wonder and adapt since this buildings size to a five year old will be 3 times larger to accommodate adult size for simulation in 2006. We perfectly left in 06, 12, and past dec 20. Your sky is actually silk from AI/ Africa. Spiders that make the strongest web that holds 4 times our weight but only at weeks a times than from 3am -4am every night bluebeam arm structure is a hairlike camera shot down through shock light laser (just like war of worlds) from drones that land on your house roof to place metal liquid through drilled hole. Hairlike camera is attracted to vibration esp mainly looking for people and they are sleeping keeping logs to have a look at what % can work night and we can change night and day with in 30 seconds and you’ll hardly notice. We don’t stop time but we bend light along with time which was discovered on north and south axis poles. Hence, we bent time and that candy cane is bent to show double helix white n red cells. When I was 5 I think. My test was, bazooka bubble gum and i unknowingly stole it. From the quote “some people can unlock the secrets of the universe by reading the back of a bubblegum wrapper. “ lex Luther - who’s favorite quote was also the person who invented virtual simulation in movie ready player one.
I got lost in that building as well as a young child. Did a summer internship and promptly got lost all over again. 😂
@@paulettemoore47 I recently frw years back did sames at discovery zone. Both places equally awesome for child like sense of wonders
Wow, I'm in that movie at 12:26 ... weird!
cool
That's awesome, was that a candid shot of you working or did they set it up?
Is this building still standing?
I assume there is no research happening there.
Late reply but it is now known as "Bell Works" is hard to explain what it is just look it up is pretty amazing.
It's a shopping center now, though there is a small tech company there too. Tragic. AT&T had terrible management.
Theres mansions built all around the building and they turned it into a town center type business. Bars, restaurants, and a library. I was there the other day, its pretty cool.
But does it have a log ride?
@@nathanjustus6659, it wasn’t ATT…. ATT spun Lucent Technologies off in ‘96. Lucent included all of the former Western Electric manufacturing facilities, e.g. Omaha Works, Denver Work, Shreveport Works, etc. it also included the vast majority of Bell Laboratories, 125k employees and a hell of a bright future. That fker Rich McGinn, the CEO of Lucent screwed the pooch misstating earnings and drove the stock down from $75 per share to .05. I’d kick his ass if I ever saw him again!!
We were all making 6 figures + and sales were strong. He allowed some very large enterprise customers to take delivery of large PBX systems and optical central office switching equipment, while not paying for it for from 5-10 years. However, he took the revenue and reported it. Unbelievable!
And now Bell Labs are a tiny little part of a foreign telecom company called Alcatel. How the fortunes have changed.
Alcatel in USA has been out of business for several years now. Nokia owns Alcatel in France.
Nokia.
Of course, nothing lasts forever.
I worked there in the 1970s.
I was only 14 in 1984 so I don’t remember much about ATT before then. But I do know how much changed after. For one you no longer had to rent a phone from the company. And over time long distance calls no longer cost 6 dollars a minute. International calls too. Prices dropped big time. Without the breakup I don’t think we’d have mobile phones today like we do. That’s why monopolies are a bad thing, among other things.
"The watch words for the 80s were competition and deregulation"
Ah, if only the makers of this film knew what the next few years would be like...
deregulation was a mistake, but competition had a very positive outcome.
Tom Servo deregulation and competition improve processes my guy!
Wow, so true - Deregulation - I remember my dad buying his first $9.99 home phone NOT from ATT. The chirpy kind with frazzling piezoelectric ringer. LOL
This is a total blast from the past lmao. Like watching a tv commercial from an alternate universe thats stuck in the past.
I thought Bell Labs didn't give a damn and told him to stop looking into space?
ABANDONEDAMERICA US - on this site you can find more interior photos of the abandoned era of The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex in Holmdel, New Jersey
Those pictures and my memories make me cry. I started at Holmdel in 1984 as a contracted tech to the ISN project - Information Systems Network - the commercial son of Datakit. I ended up back at Holmdel with Lucent in 1999 as an MTS. The library gone, plants dead, and the glass elevator not working. It was almost a relief to be laid off in 2002.
A reminder that the works of man are ephemeral.
This is stranger than life!
9:20 PROVED the Big Bang theory 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂.
Well it's true.
That building is now Costco’s first own university. My babysitter got her law degree there back when. 25 year anniversary of higher education at Costco and sister Kirkland schools are on the rise. Just like there high rise apartments coming soon!
No it's not haha. It's the Bell Works building. It has a bunch of stores on the first floor and offices upstairs. CostCo has nothing there.
Haha I send in screen plays to see if people find it so odd it cant be true. But the real on is very spooky. 29 palms is old costco till 2011 when they movedb200 miles to arizona. Pqlm springs was winter retreat for every costco worker in the midwest for 4 day vacation. Costco owns lots of land and has ties with the militaryvl famikes in the area. Kid you not it was likeba whole tiwn in one building bigger than staples center
Telegraph was before the birth of telephone
the time of true science and discoveries before we invented wokeness and social networks
A crying shame !
Родные мои, вы определенно издеваетесь над зрителями, выкладывая видео в настолько низком разрешении. Ау, проснитесь, на дворе не 1920-е годы, когда практиковали механическое ТВ, и даже не 80-е, когда массово использовали VHS. Уже телевизоры в 4k начали массово появляться в наших домах, а они все еще выкладывают видео в 144p. За что вы так с нами?
What?
This documentary was compiled/published in 1982, probably using materials shot even earlier than that. In that era, US TV was still standard resolution called NTSC.
Corruption