and for more of a focus on Bell Labs, with a good chapter abuot Shannon, The Idea Factory is a wonderful read

It’s mentioned below, but ‘The Idea Factory‘ covers Bell labs and is an excellent read.

"Dealers of Lightning" by Michael Hiltzik was an excellent book on Xerox PARC.

I haven't yet read "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner, which covers Bell Labs.

A lot of this material is also covered in The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's great book about Bell Labs.

Also some wonderful color on Shannon's early life, career at Bell Labs and in academia in The Idea Factory (a fantastic read for any Hacker News reader).

Gleick's book is one of my favorite books, period.

A good followup would be Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. A great read and has a chapter or two devoted to Shannon.

If you liked The Idea Factory, you should read Kitten Clone. Kind of a dark sequel.

I read two books recommended here, and one that wasn't. The Idea Factory, by Jon Gertner, was absolutely fantastic; How the Laser Happened was also very interesting. I also read (still reading, actually) Mason and Dixon by Pynchon. Really good so far.

The Idea Factory was a pretty enlightening book. I never realized how important Bell Labs was in our technological history. They purposely sought out the best minds and gave them freedom to find the next great tech.

I am pretty sure you are referring to Russ Ackoff's lecture about his time at Bell Labs: https://vimeo.com/148192220

(If you haven't already read it and are interested in Bell Labs, 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner is worth checking out.)

another recommended book: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the great age of american innovation.

Includes a lot of interesting information, including Claude Shannon of course, who worked at Bell Labs. Bell Labs was a remarkable place.

Really enjoyed "The Idea Factory". I'm currently reading "Sandworm" - more cybersecurity related, but it's really good so far.

Another great book (about Shannon and others) is "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Idea_Factory.html?i...

The similarly named book "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner is a great read on the history of Bell Labs if you're interested in learning more.

A really good book is "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner. It describes Bell Labs in this period, and through the book basically tells the story of where modern life was born: everything from growing crystals to transistors to cell phones to radar was created at Bell Labs.

I agree with your comments 100%, I too read and enjoyed the book and found it very complementary to The Idea Factory

The Idea Factory was also a book where a guy journed his struggles through MIT grad school (mech engineering I think). Was interesting though gloomy: http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-Learning-Think/dp/026...

For those interested in learning more about Bell Labs I recommend you check out the book "The Idea Factory" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...).

The Idea Factory by Gertner was great, and in fact Kernighan's memoir specifically recommended it for more detail on Bell Labs!

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

Search for the many HN comments about this 2013 book:

https://www.google.com/search?q=idea+factory+site%3Anews.yco...

"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner is a fantastic book on this subject. I highly recommend it.

Chapter 11 of The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (a book about Bell Labs) has a fun story about the first transatlantic telephone cable, completed in 1956. According to him, telegraph cables were attempted as early as the 1850s, but the first successful one was in 1866, between Canada and Ireland.

I highly recommend reading The Idea Factory. It's a fascinating historical account of Bell Labs and how they performed research.

I've been enjoying The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner. It's well written and covers the history of Bell Labs from the early days.

The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"[1] is a must read for those interested in Shannon and the history of Bell Labs.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" is a great story about the history of Bell Labs and how the anti-trust suit effectively killed it.

"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

"The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner.

Both The Idea Factory and Titan were excellent. Haven't read any of the others yet. I'd recommend reading The First Tycoon[0] before Titan, as chronologically it sets the stage very well for the world Rockefeller rose to power in.

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4839382-the-first-tycoon

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner

http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...

Thanks, I just picked it up. I read The Idea Factory last year and found it fascinating.

How about some context books:

“The Idea Factory” by Gertner
“Linked” by Barabasi
“Deep Simplicity” by Gribbin
“The Black Swan” by Talib
“Chaos” by Gleick
“The Experience Economy” by Gilmore & Pine

To whom is interested in history - "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32919530-a-mind-at-play is an excellent book. A good companion to this is The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...

Most recently, been doing some skill refreshing with Jon Bentley's "Programming Pearls" and Paul Graham's "ANSI Common Lisp".

Not too long ago, Pepper White's "The Idea Factory".

I heartily second the recommendation for "The Idea Factory"! I'm currently reading this book and aside from the seriously impressive run of successes, the characters are really quite amusing at times too. E.g., Shannon built a desktop calculator that operated using Roman numerals only ("THROBAC") in order to amuse himself. And some of the whimsical creations were pretty impressive in their own right. E.g., his maze-solving mouse "Theseus" learned the maze layout on progressive runs through the maze by using relay-based logic.

* Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich: A great pop-sci book about how animals adapt to extreme winter biomes

* Deep by James Nestor: A look at the extreme sport of freediving, where contestants train to submerge to depths much greater than 400ft without any oxygen and pressure equalizing equipment

* The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by John Gertner: A great book about the history of Bell Labs, the scientists and engineers that brought great innovations to society including phones

* Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer: A biography of Nikola Tesla. Its quite astounding how much one person can achieve in their lifetime

I read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and they had a few sections on Shannon. Honestly, from what I read, it sounds like the guy didn't want to work, or have a job. And the Fates were kind, and dropped him into a situation where not only was he able to make that a reality, but he was able to provide several meaningful contributions to the fields of programming and information theory while doing so. He was able to not have to "work", and get to be part of some pretty amazing stuff.

Could not agree more with The Idea Factory, his talks are also great. I also came away feeling inspired, nostalgic and the book is very fun. They are some real characters.

There’s some good picks in the similar books I’ve been looking at: https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/16750267-the-idea-fac...

If you haven’t read Ben Franklins autobiography it’s also pretty fun and inspiring.

Some of my favourite internet-specific books:

- The Dream Machine. Fantastic tech history coverage with a particular focus on the lead up to the internet https://press.stripe.com/#the-dream-machine.

- Tools for Thought - Lots of similar ground to the Dream Machine but with a less internet-centric focus. Still great though - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tools-Thought-History-Mind-Expandin...

Perhaps not internet focused, but tangential/technology:

- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

- One Giant Leap (Apollo Missions. Decent amount of computing foucs)

- Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson

- Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration. Lots of interesting snippets of tech and non-tech history

The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner. It's about Bell Labs and the people behind it.

The idea that a company would have some kind of special research division where people can pretty much do as they wish (just "improve the product") feels like something in a fantasy world. But it existed, and it gave us amazing inventions that fast forwarded technology and improved the lives of everyone, and barely anyone even knows about it! Lasers, the transistor, fiber optics, UNIX, the cell network, even friggin information theory.

Even the [eventual] HQ building was designed in a interesting way. They had purposely long hallways of offices, so whenever you had to go to lunch (or the bathroom) you would inevitably be 'caught' by coworkers, forcing interaction.

The ingenuity and brilliance coming from Bell Labs during that era is absolutely astonishing. Transistors, information theory, satellite communication, UNIX/C, the list goes on. These ideas unquestionably laid the foundation for modern high-tech society.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Bell Labs and the folks who worked there, “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner is a fantastic book written on the subject. It’s not comprehensive but it’s a very inspiring read.

There has always been something very vexing about Bell Labs’ legacy though. They had everything they needed to start the personal computing revolution: engineers, scientists, equipment, a nationwide telephone network for god’s sake. What happened?

A few months ago I ordered a book on a whim called "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation." [0]

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how much I learned. There were amazing minds at Bell Labs who were given free reign to innovate (as a direct result of AT&T's huge monopoly and revenue stream) and ended up laying the groundwork for many ideas and concepts we take for granted today.

The book is so dense with information and anecdotes but I'd still consider it a page-turner. I highly recommend it.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

The full list: https://gitlab.com/rlease/Books

My list lines up with a lot of books that people have recommended here, so I'll try to add a few favorites that haven't been mentioned so far.

Fiction:

1. Ubik - I read a bunch of Philip K. Dick this year, but this was my favorite. It's delightfully mind bending and left me thinking about it long after the book was done.

2. All the Pretty Horses - Beautifully written. McCarthy has an uncanny ability to paint with words.

3. Cannery Row - Short, witty, and full of interesting characters.

Nonfiction:

1. The Idea Factory - A dive into how Bell Labs became such an innovation powerhouse and gives a rounded picture of the figureheads that brought it so much fame.

2. Moonwalking with Einstein - A fun read about a journalist who took researching a memory competition a bit too seriously.

3. Countdown to Zero Day - A fascinating look at the development and deployment of Stuxnet -- the virus built to set Iran's nuclear program back.

I find a lot of these books too abstract. I much prefer books about people and their methods and accomplishments, as opposed to books that try to distill what they perceive as common characteristics of "succesful" people/businesses. Currently I'm reading "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" and its quite wonderful.

"Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla" is a good read as well.

Howard Rheingold's 'Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology' - covers George Boole, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John Von Neumann

Jon Gernter's 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation' - very cool story about the formation of Bell Labs and covers the Transistor, Satellite comms, the laser, and a ton of other stuff up till, but not disappointingly not including Unix.

John Markoff's 'What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry' - what is says!

Ted Nelson's 'Geeks Bearing Gifts' (or any of his YouTube Computers For Cynics videos) - awesome, curmudgeonly alternative (but accurate) version of computer history.

Michael A. Hiltzik's 'Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age' - as someone else mentioned, really great history

The Idea Factory was excellent and really delves into the nuance of topics many of us see as black and white (government regulation vs. laissez-faire capitalism, monopolies vs. competition, pure vs. applied research)

The author also does a great job at making his subjects come alive. You really get a feel for the great minds of years past who have often stumbled in the dark before coming up with brilliant theories that we all still rely on.

The Idea Factory is a great book, it totally shatters the myths so often propagated today.

It demonstrates without doubt that innovation can happen at a very large scale in very large, monopolistic, noncompetitive organizations. In fact, there's reason to believe that innovation might require a very large organization, because small companies don't have the funds needed to do research, and are likely to be unable to capture the market even if their research does bear fruit.

The Master Switch by Tim Wu [0] goes into great detail about how AT&T invented this racket 120+ years ago and has been perfecting their fleecing tactics since. I particularly enjoy the opening of the book at a 1916 top hat banquet celebrating just how filthy rich their monopoly has become under Theodore Vail.

The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner [1] however asserts that the AT&T monopoly allowed Bell Labs to essentially invent the entire information age, but that without the official monopoly, we no longer see the huge investments in basic research, and commensurate major break throughs.

Damn if you do. Damned if you don't.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Switch-Information-Empires...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/...

I've read that the Bell Labs offices were designed in order to promote collaboration. It was laid out such that there'd be long hallways between the offices and things like restrooms and stairs, so that there'd be greater chances of colleagues bumping into each other and talking about work.

I don't have a copy of The Idea Factory[1], where I recall reading this handy, but that's my best recollection.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

"A technical leader should also make time for growing and mentoring others."

I like this. From reading The Idea Factory, I learned that at Bell Labs it was compulsory for even the most established scientists (e.g. Shockley and Shannon) to mentor newer recruits from time to time. Mentorship is one of the highest leverage activities one can possibly do. Even if you're a high muckety-muck, you're mission is still well-served by teaching others part of the time.

For those interested in learning more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory". It's a history of Bell Labs, focusing both on the biographies of the engineers and also a meta story about how you create an organization that consistently produces impactful innovation.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

Fiction:

Permutation City - Greg Egan

Revival - Stephen King

Glasshouse - Charles Stross

The City - Dean Koontz

Non-fiction:

Predictable Revenue - Aaron Ross

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World - Steven Johnson

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Jon Gertner

How Doctors Think - Jerome Groopman

Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up To Biotech's Brave New Beasts - Emily Anthes

Zero to One - Peter Thiel

I was working as my department's internal R&D director a couple years ago and I was interested in the first question as well. Note that that position probably sounds way more important than it actually was. Coincidentally, it was at one of the places Alan Kay mentions in an answer to the linked Quora question.

I pretty much focused on 3 different entities: DARPA, Xerox PARC, and Bell Labs. These are the books I read to try to answer that question:

[1] Dealers of Lightning. https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...
[2] The Department of Mad Scientists. https://www.amazon.com/Department-Mad-Scientists-Remaking-Ar...
[3] The Idea Factory. https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

I personally thought that having access to a diverse set of disciplines & skills and a reasonable budget were two of the more important things.

Right now: "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Judith Grisel)

Recommend. Addict turned neuroscientist who doesn't hold back, so a good mix of gritty details—

> After I got sober, it took me a little over a year to go a single day without wishing for a drink, but it was more than nine years before my craving to get high abated.

—and science.

Before that: "Educated: A Memoir" (Tara Westover)

Recommend. A good break from typical non-fiction books: easy to read, sometimes thrilling, and emotional.

Before that: "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America" (Margaret Pugh O'Mara)

Don't recommend. I really wanted to like this book, and I believe some of the themes are important and aren't often discussed. E.g., the support the Valley received from politicians, the lobby groups, the size of military spending back in the day…

It's possible my expectations were in the wrong place—I wanted to be inspired like with "The Idea Factory" (Jon Gertner), "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder), "Dealers of Lightning" (Michael A Hiltzik), etc.

In reading The Idea Factory[1] it became incredibly clear that Bell Labs only released and licensed a great deal of this technology as the results of various antitrust settlements that plagued the company throughout its entire existence. Also, part of the role of the labs appears to have been to give the company something to "show off" whenever congress or the DOJ complained about the extraction of monopoly rents. I highly recommend the book, it was really fascinating to see the degree to which many of our assumptions about the functioning of the labs and its relationship with the corporation are in fact historically inaccurate.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...

This article perfectly summed up my experience at MIT.

As the article hints, the competitive nature of the student body is a double-edged sword - it helps push you further than you think you're capable of, but it can also push you beyond your breaking point. In a lot of cases, it's a fine line.

To any MIT students reading this:

1) You deserve to be there. Really.

2) You are not alone (read Pepper White's "The Idea Factory" if you don't believe me).

3) Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength.

4) Failing is not the end of the world.

5) Unless you are going to war or face a diagnosis of a terminal disease, everything else after MIT is easy. It gets better.

Please take care of yourselves. Take a break, decompress, have a little fun. The world is a better place with you all in it.

RIP Fes-Mike http://tech.mit.edu/V113/N3/martinez.03o.html

I am currently reading "The Idea Factory" [1], the story of Bell Labs and its innovation streak for many decades. There were so many amazing things Bell Labs worked on - all directly related to solving business problems. At one point, they were given a task of developing the most perfect lubrication oil dispenser with a requirement that it dispenses exactly 15 drops of oil per squeeze of the trigger. They worked on Tractors that dug channels for laying telephone lines to materials that lead to the invention of the transistor to solve the problem of unreliability of vacuum tube based switch boards. Some worked on improving manufacturing and invented what we call Quality Control. Everything was deep and wide, but still tied to the Bell's business.

When I look at Google X and bunch of modern corporate labs (Lab 126, Facebook probably has something, Intel Labs (drones!), Microsoft Labs), I see a whole lotta hoo haa about tech innovation, but nothing with a long term vision of integration, capitalization and sustenance. No sense of practicality and pragmatism. May be Loon is a way to make Google an internet company (ISP), I could be wrong but as an outsider, it feels like a PR stunt than anything else.

Highly recommend this book.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

The usual recommendations are: "Racing the Beam", "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", "The Idea Factory", "Soul of a New Machine", "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce"

All fine reads. But I just want to remark how singular "Masters of Doom" is. It struck me just the other day. The entire id Software team was 18-19 years old. And each individually possessed 4-5 years of (bare-metal) computer game making experience by the time they joined!

I think about that a lot when I see high schoolers today crafting worlds so easily in Unity ;)

I'll happily "third" the recommendation for The Idea Factory. It really is an inspiring read, and I expect many firms could find some actionable takeaways to apply within their own organizations, even today. Yes, Bell Labs had some specific circumstances that allowed them some luxuries that other firms may not have, but their success is not as simple as "they had a monopoly, herp derp".

A desire to recreate great things from the past always comes with some hindsight bias. What we'd like is a dataset about hundreds of labs like PARC and what happened to them. Of course, we could never get it, so we have to work with our observed history. But sometimes, in the case of these big labs, I wonder how much we can conclude.

I recently read The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs, and it has great insights, to be sure, but enough information about the causality to recreate Bell Labs? I don't know.

Maybe it really does come down to one thing, like funding, as the top comment (currently) on this thread suggests. But I doubt it.

When I was younger, my siblings and I played this game that we sort of made up as we went (too detailed to explain), and it was awesome. Years later, in a bout of nostalgia, we tried to recreate it and it was just awful. Enough small details had changed that it didn't work. One of the important details that changed was a total lack of spontaneity. All of us knew what the outcome should be like, and it made us behave differently. I don't think big orgs are at all immune from this effect of expectations.

Don't get me wrong, I'm obsessed with the famous labs like anyone, a big fan of Alan Kay, etc. I just think somebody needs to call attention to a giant hurdle in learning from them.

No, C and Unix were not developed to improve global telephony.

Part of the story is that Ken Thompson wanted to play a video game. This is documented in a number of places

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)

As a part of porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed his own operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system.

Multics was closer to something "important", while Unix was something unimportant and a great example of the principle laid out in the article.

Also, the first application of Unix beyond Bell Labs was typesetting. They were using it to produce patent applications, saving the labor of many secretaries. It was not used for telephony.

C was co-evolved with Unix as portable language to write an OS in.

---

edit: For some color on how Bell Labs related to the rest of the org, I recommend "The Idea Factory" by Gertner and Brian Kernighan's recent memoir on Unix.

Interesting list, and some familiar names (W. Brian Arthur in particular is strongly recommended), along with some notable omissions (Schumpeter's already been mentioned).

I'd suggest a few additions:

- John H. Holland has outlined, though I'm not sure he's actually written a book on, the process of innovation and novel creation, which he describes generally as a mostly recombinative process. New inventions are almost always produced as an edit of one or more earlier ones. Sometimes via deletion, often through combination, sometimes through duplication. This applies to both human invention and genetic processes. (Holland is best known as the father of genetic algorithms.) I'm aware of his work through the Santa Fe Institute, where his ideas have been carried on by others (Arthur is another SFI affiliate).

- Kevin Kelley, What Technology Wants. I'm not a fan, but it's an influential book. Steven Johnson has a number of similarly-pitched titles, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Information and How We Got to Now especially.

- Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies puts innovation and complexity in their larger societal context and cycle.

- Histories of industrial R&D labs are insightful. Two of which I'm aware, David A. Hounshell, Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902--1980, and Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Can someone tell me what is so great about SotNM? (It even won a Pulitzer.) I read a bunch of computer history books last year, and these were all more interesting IMO:

- John Gernter, The Idea Factory

- T.R. Reid, The Chip

- Stephen Levy, Hackers

- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late

- Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning

- Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work

(Actually I read Levy & Lammers a long time ago, but they're both better than SotNM too.)

Those were full of themes like patents and broad use of technology, interaction between government and private enterprise, monopolies, private research institutes and the need for profit, challenges commercializing your discoveries, the culture around early computer use, etc. They had profiles of famous computer pioneers. They told the history of tech I use every day.

SotNM didn't have anyone I recognized and was about a machine I'd never heard of before. Its biggest theme was how overworked the engineers were (also present in those other books, but not as dominant), at the cost of their health and marriages, with little-to-no reward. It was monotonous and depressing.

So what did other people appreciate about it? With books I don't expect to always "see" everything there on my own, so maybe someone can help me learn what I'm missing.

Maybe not perfect matches, but a few titles I'm familiar with that you might like:

Dreaming in Code - covers Mitch Kapor's post Lotus effort to build Chandler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code

Everyone Else Must Fail - all about Larry Ellison and Oracle

https://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Else-Must-Fail-Unvarnished/d...

Winners, Losers & Microsoft - title says it all

https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Competition-...

Two books by Bill Gates:

Business At The Speed of Thought

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Speed-Thought-Succeeding-Dig...

and

The Road Ahead

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Ahead-Completely-Up-Date/dp/0140...

Also:

MCI: Failure Is Not An Option

https://www.amazon.com/MCI-Failure-Invented-Competition-Tele...

Already mentioned, but I feel obligated to add another +1 for these three:

The Soul of a New Machine - Kidder

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Levy

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Gertner

Also, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, you might enjoy the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire. Yes it's fiction and highly dramatized, but it captures a lot of the spirit of the times from the beginnings of the PC era up through the Dot Com Bubble era.

I recently read The Idea Factory [1] which covers Bell Labs in its heyday. Many of the most brilliant human beings of that era worked for very modest salaries, and seemed content to do so. I wonder why it is that nowadays the "smartest" people tend to work in tech or finance and mostly pursue wealth. A few possibilities:

1. The rate of meaningful new discoveries in basic research has slowed significantly compared to the mid 1900s. Most important advances now involve enormous groups of researchers, and require decades of work. So the basic research route is less appealing overall.

2. Technology and finance provide clear avenues for outsized financial returns that simply weren't available in the past. Enrico Fermi, for example, was fairly enterprising. He wasn't an academic ascetic at least, and made some effort to amass wealth. But the best strategies he came up with were publishing textbooks and maybe some dabbling in the stock market (That is if I remember my details from The Last Man Who Knew Everything [2] correctly)

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746094-the-last-man-wh...

Bhagvad Gita (as it is) - A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Not just a spiritual book, more like the guiding principles that anyone, starting something new, could use.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Jon Gertner

Bell Labs, the RnD wing of AT&T-was the best laboratory for new ideas in the world. The book tells a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant people - Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker.

Peak - Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
You must have heard this a 1000 times - "you can do this", the book is about - "yes, and this is how"

The master algorithm - Pedro Domingos
Book details out the philosophies of various schools of thought in AI - deep learning, bayesian, genetic, reasoning - in a very simple language.

What technology wants - Kevin Kelly
Technology is a living organism and there are patterns to the technology evolution, not unlike the organic evolution.

I've been reading The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner recently and I feel like the parallels between the two are really striking. The advent of Google X projects, the Motorola acquisition, and all of the recent robotics acquisitions make it feel like Google is actually building the future that I've been dreaming of since I was in elementary school.

I only hope that the next wave of technological innovation will be far more decentralized than the last one. We haven't had a Bell Labs like organization in a long time. Maybe one day we won't need one.

I don't think he's trying to make any moral judgements. He's just making observations about what actually works within the context of our capitalist system. Capitalism has produced this period of explosive growth centered around technology in the USA and Silicon Valley in particular. And if you are trying to participate in that ecosystem, then you should understand what he says (IMO).

There wasn't any part of the essay which says you should start a startup, or that it is a morally valuable thing to do.

I somewhat agree with you that capitalism doesn't produce optimum value for society. Zynga's maybe an example of that -- I'm sure the are worse ones. But as the saying going, we have the worst system except for all the other ones that have been tried. For all the Zyngas there are some pretty good companies too.

Also, I think your question is essentially hypothetical or philosophical: "should be allow it to?" Who's we? Short of an overthrow of the US government, I think this segment of the economy will exist for a long time.

If you want to have an interesting reflection on capitalism, read "The Idea Factory", about Bell Labs. That is the other end of a spectrum -- a single company holding a monopoly for 50+ years. But it actually produced immeasurable value. It's interesting to think on which model produces more value -- a monopoly where people are free from competitive pressures, or an intensely competitive market.

The same thought occurred to me; I think it's probably more along the lines of "faster and relying on more intuition".

I don't think this is a new concept; Jon Gertner in his excellent book "The Idea Factory" writes how the researchers at Bell Labs switched from basic research to development during WW2 and operated in a similar way. If anything, the urgency of development in the war effort resembled a startup in how it accomplished within a few short years projects that would have taken decades in peacetime.

The Idea Factory, by Pepper White

If people are interested in tech monopolies, innovation, and government, here are some great books:

- The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by John Gertner: A running theme is how AT&T was motivated to "give back" to the country to avoid anti-monopoly action by the government. I take today's talk about Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon to be a negotiating tactic to motivate them to act similarly, although I wouldn't be surprised to see real government involvement either.

- The Chip by T. R. Reid: the invention of the integrated circuit near-simultaneously by two different people/companies.

- Where Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon: the origins of ARPANET at BBN.

Two other closely-related themes in these books are:

- Patents (a limited monopoly), and how the patents for both transistors and integrated circuits were licensed very freely, allowing much faster innovation.

- Government spending, e.g. how the space race and arms buildup paid for the early years of IC development before they were commercially competitive with just wiring up lots of components.

. . .

OT, I found all these books more interesting than The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Although it won a Pulitzer, it never felt like any of it "mattered" in the same way. (I had never heard of the Data General Eclipse.) It just seemed like another story of engineers killing themselves with overwork.

Currently reading The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't - Nate Silver

Before that, I had just finished The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner.

Next, I may read Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan.

Funny, I just posted this: http://willsllc.github.com/blog/books-2012/

Most Thought-Provoking Books of 2012

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner published March 15, 2012
Over the span of a few decades, a single research lab invented the transistor, the microprocessor, radar, the communication satellite, the CD, and more.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg published February 28, 2012
Why toothpaste tingles, how Febreeze was a flop, and hundreds of other tidbits that are perfect for cocktail parties and future Jeopardy episodes.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
by Nate Silver published September 27, 2012
Weaves together baseball, earthquakes, the weather, poker, and terrorism. Chapter 7 is the best description of Bayes theoreom I've ever read.

The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves
by Dan Ariely published June 5, 2012
The third Ariely book, and just as fun. Would be ranked #1 except it's essential the same formula as his prior two gems.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner published August 30, 2012
Surprisingly good read from a first-time author (and YC alum). Expands on Andreessen's quip to cover trading, couter-terrorism, the Arab Spring and more.

Non-fiction:

On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins

How To Create A Mind - Ray Kurzweil

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

The Origin of Wealth - Eric Beinhocker

The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver

The Money Culture - Michael Lewis

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations - David Warsh

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing - John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm

The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner

Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - Michael J. English and William H. Baker

Wellsprings of Knowledge - Dorothy Leonard-Barton

If Only We Knew What We Know - Carla O'dell and C. Jackson Grayson

Started, but haven't finished yet:

The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

Marketing Warfare - Jack Trout and Al Ries

Naked Statistics - Charles Wheelan

Wiki Management - Rod Collins

Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal - Ayn Rand

Fiction:

NOS4A2 - Joe Hill

The first four books in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman

Innocence - Dean Koontz

Deeply Odd - Dean Koontz

Doctor Sleep - Stephen King

The Black List - Brad Thor

Most of The New Lovecraft Circle - an anthology of Lovecraft mythos stories by contemporary writers

And started re-reading Asimov's Foundation last night. I've read the original trilogy before, but this time I intend to read all seven books. But I'm starting with Foundation and going to the end, before going back to the prequels.

I think that everyone should read The Idea Factory, for a reason similar to the reason that everyone should learn Lisp. Bell Labs no longer exists, and you will never get to work there; but you can learn how research and supervision could be done, and that will help you route around whatever damage keeps the handbrake on at the place where you do work.

Those poor, poor guys. Nobody deserves their awful fate: To have to try to invent an audacious new startup, with a hazily defined product that is bound to let half of the audience down when it doesn't have unicorns and rainbows, all the while living in a fishbowl, surrounded on all sides by a mob six thousand strong, a mob made of people who feel that, having kicked in thirty whole US dollars, they deserve something awesome.

It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad school. I have read Pepper White's The Idea Factory, a book which gave me nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents' expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And these are people without an audience of thousands.

So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going to need therapy?

Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September and puts on a Youtube production of Springtime for Hitler I'll send them fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.

Indeed "The Idea Factory" is a very good book recommendation. In the conclusion of the book the author argues that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute[1] may be the closest existing research organization to Bell Labs. While much smaller in size than Bell Labs it shares a focus on basic research and is well funded for the long haul.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes_Medical_Institute

Proving myself that I have what it takes was not my only reason, I apologize for making it seem like that I just want to go there because its prestigious. I stumbled upon a book that sums it up nicely. Its called The Idea Factory by Pepper White. Just a little summary of the back cover: "When Pepper White enters MIT, one of his professors tells him that it does not much matter what he studies there. What MIT will do is teach him how to think."

I want to learn how to think. For some reason this reminds me of Richard Feynman..he had such clarity in his explanations that came from a deep understanding of things. I want to try and reach that level of understanding and clarity. The way he told stories just kept me wanting more. I want to have people at the edge of their seats wanting more, I would love to teach anyone the most complex of subjects, and have them getting an a-ha! moment and just having as much fun as Richard Feynman did. You could see the joy in his face when he explained how certain things worked.

I was amazed after finishing The Idea Factory and realizing how much we (as humans and as the tech industry specifically) owe to Bell Labs. The invention of UNIX gets literally one sentence in the book and I think that's the scale it deserves given their work in every other piece of communication and electronic technology.

Thank you for this comment. Most people aren't aware of the relationship that Bell was in with the gov't because of its status as a monopoly. Before the gov't broke up Bell, it agreed to let Bell have the monopoly on the telephone system, and in exchange, Bell "gave back" to the public in the form of new, "public domain" technology. Not just the transistor, but also Unix and the C programming language. Sometimes I wonder how farther we might be in our technological development if Bell had never been broken up.

Folks wanting to know more about Bell Labs can check out "The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner.

Agreed. That said, to give some credit, here are a few I’ve read during the last few years that I can offer as counter examples:

* All the shah’s men, by Stephen Kinzer, about how the 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was orchestrated.

* The Idea Factory, by John Gertnee, about the history of Bell Labs

* A mind at play, by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, about Claude Shannon

* Ike’s bluff, by Evan Thomas, about Dwight Eisenhower

* The Wise Men, by Walter Isacsson and Evan Thomas, about diplomats during the Truman administration

I tend to be more skeptical about books written by journalists that relate to some specific topic rather than historical narrative. Additionally, I tend to read the historical narratives with more skepticism than I do when I read history books written by professional historians.

Antitrust was a disaster for Bell Labs, which gave us inventions like the transistor and Unix. Nothing as noteworthy after the breakup and string of acquisitions. In the same way I’m worried for all the moon shoot projects at these big companies if they are broken up. I suggest reading the Idea Factory and then see how you feel about breaking up big tech.

The title is a bit misleading. The army and Bell Labs could have built a cellular phone in the 1940s, but they had no way to keep it connected to the telephone network as it moved between cells. That required computerized telephone switches, which weren't developed until at least the 1960s; that triggered another big regulatory mess.

The details are in The Idea Factory, which every scientist and engineer should read. The main reason that AT&T didn't get the spectrum is that they didn't really want it: video phones were going to be the future.

I hope others will chime in with followup sources, but if you want a book for historical background The Idea Factory covers the creation of the transistor and touches upon Shockley, the Traitorous Eight, and Fairchild Semiconductor which is sort of the inception of the US semiconductor industry. It's not exactly the focus of the book, but everything it covers is tied together.