This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. --- I’ve been working through Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory this month. The book covers the early history of the storied industrial research lab Bell Labs. Though I’m not finished yet, the book, combined with a week-long vacation in Paris, has triggered some thoughts in me I wanted to share. Bell Labs’ prolific history of innovation and discovery in computing includes the vacuum tube, the transistor, C, and UNIX. Given ...
