I wonder how much of the Gross Domestic Product can be attributed to work that came from Bell Labs. Just think of the transistor and the electronics revolution. Yes, I know that people at Purdue University were following a parallel track, but I suspect that industry would have been quicker to recognize the importance of something coming from Bell Labs.
This is sad in so many ways. The team that produced the transistor effect (Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley) went on to essentially start Silicon Valley (Intel, AMD, National Semi etc). That alone should account for a substantial part of GDP today. But AT&T probably did not even make much money out of many other Bell Labs achievements e.g. information theory and Unix (in the latter case, they tried but were prevented by law I believe). And then there were such things like the laser and the fibre-optic revolutions. The recent BLAST wireless system may well turn out to be the last big contribution of that institution. In many ways the success of the old Bell Labs is a negation of the modern way of corporate organization and R&D: a patriarchal bureucracy rather than a competitive firm, led by conservative managers not superstar CEOs or enterpreneurs, bright individuals working mostly for pride and peer-recognition rather than for stock options. Of course one can imagine that the old Bell Labs had its own class hierarchy much like an Ivy League university of today. It appears to have been an elitist club with no room for upstarts. It is safe to say that Michael Faraday if he was born in the 20'th century would not have got a job at Bell Labs - at least not until he was already famous. The present destruction of Bell Labs has been going on for a while now. One almost wishes they would shut the lab down or rename it to preserve its legacy. But of course some idiot bean-counter would first want to measure how many dollars the brand name is worth.. Is nothing sacred anymore? -raghu.
