15 Sep
2012
15 Sep
'12
2:05 p.m.
On 09/15/2012 03:01 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I'm surprised you'd even take that swing.
For openers the most famous, the transistor.
The most notable was K&R were employed by Bell Labs.. so Unix and
all the useful utilities.
Bell Labs like your GPO was the local experts on switches and all things
switching and yes, they were indeed involved. What they learned went
into their automated billing and switching systems. They were
involved with relay computers and later electronic ones as well.
Allison
thats so funny. I hope Ill eventually remembes who I was conversing
with, or even when it was, but was told that phone companies should have
been way ahead. After all a computer is just a bunch of switches (one of
the best definitions of a computer imho, albeit informal, for those with
a smattering of electronics knowledge).
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for codebreaking in the UK in
WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO research
labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the telephone system
in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of switching systems.
And how many computer debvelopments came from the Bell Telephone labs?