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Brian Kernighan was one of my most consistently requested guests and so I was excited to have him on the podcast. He’s a former Bell Labs member of technical staff, co-author of the original C book, and the one who popularized “Hello World.” I interviewed him for all of his stories around the legendary place and the folks that worked there. I also did some extra digging for this interview to come up with some interesting tidbits to discuss. For instance, I found a post where someone used modern hardware to break the old encryption scheme they used back in the day. I read his old password back to him in the interview. I brought my gear and traveled to his office at Princeton. You can tell I shot it myself because my angle is out of focus for a large part of the episode. I figured out a better way to self-monitor after this episode so hopefully it doesn’t happen again. Hope you enjoy the episode! Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Timestamps 00:42 - What Bell Labs was and how he got hired 06:34 - Why so many inventions came from Bell Labs 14:15 - A day in the life at Bell Labs 27:55 - The most impressive people he worked with 33:50 - The AT&T film explaining Unix 39:46 - Why C was so influential 48:40 - What he misses most about Bell Labs 54:10 - Are LLMs bad for computer science education 01:01:46 - His 1972 commit in the Go repo 01:03:43 - Grace Emlen, the fake Bell Labs employee 01:07:39 - Why he writes so many books 01:19:58 - His favorite and least favorite languages 01:24:28 - Advice for students and young people Transcript 00:42 — What Bell Labs was and how he got hired Ryan: [00:42] Could you explain what Bell Labs was and what is the story behind you getting a job there? Brian: [00:55] So Bell Labs was like the research arm of AT&T. It was founded in, I think, 1923, ‘25, something like that. AT&T at that point was growing. It had absorbed a bunch of the local telephone companies across the whole country, and they realized that they just needed to understand things better so that they could improve service. So they set up a research operation, which was called Bell Telephone Laboratories. [01:23] It was in New York on West Street, and people did all kinds of things related to improving telephony. In 1963, something like that, in the early ‘60s, they basically moved the whole operation to New Jersey, northern New Jersey, a place called Murray Hill, near Summit and things like that. So call it 25 miles west of New York City. And that was a big operation. There were probably 3,000 people in one connected set of buildings doing research in all kinds of things. [02:02] Physics, semiconductor physics, devices like that, chemistry, optical fiber kinds of things, just all sorts of research. And then more on the soft end, there was mathematics and increasingly there was computers, computer-related things as they gradually came to the realization that computing was gonna be part of the future in some way or another. In the summer of 1966, I was a grad student here at Princeton, but I got an internship at MIT in Cambridge working in Project MAC, which was basically the Multics project. [02:39] And so I used CTSS, that first original timesharing system, done by Fernando Corbató and friends, to develop software for the Multics system, which was just starting up. And that was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. I’m not sure I ever did anything that was very useful, but part of it was then the next year I got an internship at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. So I was still a graduate student, and that would be roughly the third year here, I got this internship at Bell Labs, and that was a lot of fun. [03:18] And I worked there, I worked actually with Doug McIlroy for the summer, came back here, continued to stall on doing my thesis work, which I guess is what one does. And then I got another internship in the summer of 1968, and there I worked with Shen Lin, and he and I worked on a problem which had been suggested by my advisor here. And this was graph partitioning. And he and I worked on it, and we came up with an algorithm that did a pretty decent job on part of it. [03:50] I came up with several special cases that you could do really well. And then I wrote up the thesis really quickly and escaped. Ryan: [03:57] Escaped Princeton. Brian: [04:00] Escaped from Princeton. I took a whole week off and went to Bell Labs because they’d given me a return offer, which was very sweet of them. And I stayed there then until roughly 2000 in the group that had done or was doing a variety of things. Ryan: [04:15] Did you consider other career opportunities at the time? Brian: [04:19] I think I didn’t consider any other option whatsoever. I mean, I had really enjoyed the summers. The two summers were great. The people were really, really nice and interesting. There was stuff to do. It was close. I didn’t have to go anywhere, as it were. And so I literally never considered anything else. I never had a job interview, nothing like that. I just went there. So it was kind of like falling down the fall line or something like that. [04:48] I think partly it was helped along by some sort of old boy network, where somebody here at Princeton knew somebody at Bell Labs, because there’s a lot of back and forth between the 2 institutions. And so I’m sure that kind of thing helped. It also helped, I think, at MIT that a guy who had had an internship the year before me had done a bang-up job for them. And so that probably said, well, these folks from Princeton are maybe okay. [05:17] So I’m grateful to him too. Ryan: [05:19] Nowadays, Bell Labs is so legendary, but at that time, what was the social perception? If I had talked to your peers and said, “Hey, what do you think of Bell Labs?” what would they have said at that time? Brian: [05:33] I suspect that it depended on the field, but probably for most of them, they would’ve thought, yeah, yeah, this is a really good place. Because in the physical sciences, it was obviously the powerhouse in a lot of respects. That’s where your transistor came from, for example. And a lot of things related to communications, that’s where information theory came from. It’s where error-correcting codes came from. [05:54] All of these things that were sort of critical advances in technology had come from Bell Labs. Bell Labs was a part of the scientific community. People who went to Bell Labs published in exactly the same journals and went to the same conferences, collaborated with people in the same universities. And so it was really an integral part, I think, of the scientific community at the time. And that was largely, I will say, the physical sciences kind of thing, but it obviously sort of spread out into other things that were peripherally related. [06:27] And certainly the mathematicians were absolutely first-rate as well. Tended to be applied mathematicians rather than theoretical ones. 06:34 — Why so many inventions came from Bell Labs Ryan: [06:34] Everything you just said there is an insane value for humanity, the transistor and all those other things. Why is it that so much of it came from one research lab tied to a company that today is not known for all these amazing innovations? Brian: [06:56] AT&T bankrolled all kinds of contributions that Bell Labs made. And I think the way it worked was that AT&T provided telephone service to essentially the whole country. I mean, maybe it was 80%, but it was a very substantial fraction of the whole country. And that meant that they had a pretty guaranteed revenue stream. Now it was regulated. They were a regulated public monopoly. That’s the jargon term. [07:20] And that meant that their rates were set or restricted or at least evaluated by lots and lots of agencies, states, and the federal government. So there was a limit to what they could do. The quid pro quo was they got sort of a guaranteed rate of return on their investment in whatever they did with the phone company. And the quid pro quo would be that they provided telephone service to essentially everybody. [07:47] Even if you were way out in the boonies or something like that, AT&T would provide this service. And they were able to rip off a small fraction of that. I will make up a number and say 1 or 2% of their pretty much guaranteed revenues to fund a research operation that would let them improve the service. And so that was the basic, call it financial arrangement. And the other thing is it was very stable. [08:11] You could sort of predict there would be this steady increase in revenues, but predictable in a way that would guarantee that there would always be money to do something. There was no competition because AT&T had essentially what amounted to this monopoly. And so that meant that they could take a very long view of what they were doing. And so if somebody had an idea and wanted to work on it for a year or 2 or 3, fine, go for it. [08:39] And if you’ve got a bunch of people doing this, even if your idea is dumb, my idea is dumb, somebody else might have a good idea. And so if you aggregate, the output would be probably something useful almost all the time. Ryan: [08:52] What gave this lab such recruiting pull, in your opinion? How did all the best people come to this place? Brian: [09:02] Well, I think it depends. For me, it was certainly happenstance, just blind luck, being in the right place at the right time, following people who had done something that in some way prepared the way. I think if you were a physicist getting your degree in physics at pick your favorite good university, where would you go to do physics? Well, the opportunities would fundamentally be government lab perhaps, or a place like maybe IBM or maybe Bell Labs. [09:31] And Bell Labs had a sterling reputation, well-earned, for doing exceptional work in that area. So that would be, let’s say, anybody doing physics, chemistry, materials, all of that kind of stuff. I think somewhat the same would be true of anything related to mathematics, especially the mathematics of communication or anything related to communication systems. I mean, that’s where Shannon was, that’s where Hamming was, Bode, Nyquist, all of those people before those. [10:00] So that kind of, again, tremendous reputation for the place. And as I said, they were part of the scientific community. It wasn’t like it was off on Mars somewhere, and it wasn’t like you went there and disappeared. You went there and you were a part of the broader community. And so I think the computing stuff came along and had some of the same advantages, but it wasn’t clear who the heroes were at that point. [10:23] It was early-ish, because remember, I went there in 1969. So computers were still pretty young at that point. Ryan: [10:30] A lot of those names you mentioned, I mean, they were in my textbooks when I was studying. And so they’re kind of the heroes and everything. But so at that time you’re saying your perspective was they were just kind of the lead on the team, but they weren’t the legendary computer scientists. Brian: [10:51] Well, it’s hard to say, and it’s not even clear what a computer scientist is, but you want a story? When I went to Bell Labs for my first internship, so call it the summer of 1967, and I was in an office that was sort of a little smaller than the one we’re sitting in now. But as a summer intern, for some accidental reason, I had an office of my own. This never happens, but it did happen. And so I’m sitting there on the very first day at about, roughly 11 o’clock in the morning, wondering what the hell do I do? [11:23] And this older guy came along, passed the door, and he said, “Hi, I’m Dick. Let’s go to lunch.” I said, okay. So I went to lunch with Dick. I never did get his name right. And so we had a nice lunch conversation. I don’t remember anything about it. And then he went off somewhere else. And I came back and went to the next door to me and looked at the name tag on the door. It was Richard Hamming. Hamming had written the book that I had used previous semester for numerical analysis, and, of course, error correcting codes. [11:56] And there he was next door, super nice guy. And was he a computer scientist? Borderline. Yeah. But possibly he did win the 3rd Turing Award. Won it, was it that summer or the next summer? I’d have to go and look. And so there were people like that around, but in the very early days, the computing stuff was, I think, it hadn’t developed into something with its own academic structure, its own reward systems, and all those kinds of things. Ryan: [12:26] When I interviewed Leslie Lamport, and I forgot his exact timelines, but I remember early in his education, computer science wasn’t established, and he actually said it was not as respected as math and physics, or maybe because it just was a burgeoning—it was brand new. Brian: [12:47] The same thing happened here, I think. I came here as a grad student in 1964, and I came in electrical engineering. I had thought to work on computing because I had some notion that it was interesting, and I thought AI, I didn’t know a thing. Unbelievably naive. And I had sought to work with a guy named Arthur Samuel who had done some interesting stuff in computer chess playing, et cetera. And I got here, discovered it was the wrong guy. [13:16] But when I got here, the electrical engineering department had a bunch of very established, highly respected people who were doing traditional electrical engineering things, information theory, communications, solid-state physics, that kind of stuff. And a cohort of young people who had interest in computing. They had just gotten their degrees from someplace, and they were very young and wanted to do computing. [13:42] And I don’t know whether any of them ever got tenure because the older folks didn’t really grok the newer field. John Hopcroft, to pick a random example, was my technical advisor for a year. Oh. Although it was quickly discovered I was not a theoretician. But John went on to win a Turing Award and was dean of engineering at Cornell. There’s all kinds of stuff. Great guy. But he wouldn’t have gotten tenure here at that particular time because the computing science aspect of things was too new. 14:15 — A day in the life at Bell Labs Ryan: [14:15] Bell Labs is kind of famous for very hands-off management and letting the engineers do what they were doing. What is a day in the life like of an engineer working at Bell Labs? Brian: [14:30] Well, first thing, I don’t think any of us would’ve called ourselves engineers. We were doing whatever you did, but I don’t think that engineer was the right word because we weren’t really engineering. Ryan: [14:43] It was Member of Technical Staff. Brian: [14:45] Member of Technical Staff, which was a term that applied to everybody essentially. And a typical day would be basically you’d come in at whatever time, which could be anywhere from 8 in the morning to 2 or 3 in the afternoon maybe. And you would sit in your office, private office, with the door open, and you would think about whatever it was you were thinking about. Maybe you had been working on some kind of program, or maybe you were trying to prove a theorem. [15:16] That’s not me. And people would wander by and you would talk to them. They would come in, you’d have discussions on the blackboard, perhaps of technical things, or maybe just arm-waving discussions of something else. You’d walk up and down the very long main corridor to the coffee machine at the other end, where you would run into random people. There would be technical talks from time to time, maybe one every week or two, something like that, depending, sometimes from internal people, sometimes from external people. [15:48] So in a sense, maybe not too different from what you would find in a university, except there were no students. And so that meant you could do it full-time. The trade-off was that without the students, you could do more of your own thing, and you were doing it with your peers. So I would argue with somebody, Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie or whatever like that, who were my peers. I didn’t have to work with students. [16:15] But of course, the flip side is that I didn’t get any of the benefit that you get with bright young new people talking about it, except that, as a newcomer, they’re always supposedly the bright new young person. So mainly the lack of students, which I think is a mixed blessing. Ryan: [16:30] In industry, there’s often deadlines, managers, and all of that stuff, right? What’s stopping a researcher from coming in at 3, leaving at 5, not having any output? Brian: [16:46] There was no immediate stop to that period. There were no deadlines, there were no projects, there were no objectives, goals, whatever set by other people. The mechanism for deciding whether you were doing anything was that once a year you had to write down on one side of one piece of paper what you had done. And we called it the I Am Great report, and it just summarized what you’d done. And then the first and second level of management would sit in a room with the I Am Great reports from their people. [17:20] So this would be maybe 30 at the bottom, half a dozen, one, like that little tree. And they would discuss the merit of the contributions of the work that was being done by the people. And they would come up with some sort of ordering which says that you’re better than I am or vice versa. How would we compare to our peers? And that would give them a sort of roughly a rank ordering, or at least equivalence classes of people. [17:49] And if somebody hadn’t done anything for a couple of years, that would be noticed. But if somebody’d gone off on something and it didn’t pay off very well, or it was still in progress, but it looked okay or whatever, that was okay. That’s the long view that I mentioned before. It’s not like, what have you done for us the last week or even quarter? What maybe have you done over the last 2, 3 years? [18:11] And it was being assessed by people who were not driven by quarterly numbers. They were the same people as we were, except that they had moved into management, but they were still technically active and very technically knowledgeable. And then the process was repeated a couple levels up until you had an effective rank order of everybody. So that was kind of called abstract merit. I’m better than you are. [18:35] And then there was the concrete merit phase, where we’ve got this much money, how much do you get? How much do I get? Ryan: [18:39] So there were bonuses tied to— It wasn’t bonuses or anything like that. Brian: [18:46] It was simply, there’s a pot of money, this is the raise pool, and it will be overall X percent. And so you will get X minus epsilon, I’ll get X plus epsilon or vice versa. Oh, and that was once a year, and that was the whole story. But it was very deliberative. The management was collegial. If you and I were managers and we had our people, it wasn’t like my people are better than your people. It’s rather, hey, you forgot to mention that Susie did this really great thing. [19:17] Don’t forget Susie kind of thing. So it was quite collegial. Yeah. And you were being evaluated by people who understood the work and whose goals and aspirations and so on were the same as yours, do good stuff. Ryan: [19:29] It sounds like you mentioned that they’re technical. It’s like a big part of this whole system. Why is that important? Brian: [19:38] If somebody is doing something in a technical area, they have created a new program, they’ve proved a new theorem, they’ve developed a new process, whatever. If you are not technical enough to understand what they’re talking about, it’s hard for you to tell the bullshit from the actual useful content, right? So I could, not you personally, but I could blow smoke pretty well for people who were, I don’t know, who shall I insult? [20:04] MBAs. Okay. Something like that. That’s obviously a slander, but it’s easier to blow smoke at somebody who is not sort of knowledgeable in your own field, but the people that you were evaluating your work were exceptionally knowledgeable in the whole field. And so they had a pretty good eye for what was good stuff and what wasn’t yet good stuff or would perhaps never be good stuff. Ryan: [20:31] These days, this Member of Technical Staff title is— it almost has its own brand where it’s a nod towards Bell Labs and everything that that represented there, but a lot of what it is signaling is that titles don’t matter, that we’re all the same and we’re all just focused on the technical work. Did titles matter, or what was the culture at that time? Brian: [20:58] Titles didn’t matter. Everybody was on a first-name basis. There were no doctor, professor, whatever kind of titles at all. Everybody was technically a member of staff, Member of Technical Staff. And I say everybody, this is of course an oversimplification. There were a variety of supporting people who, lab technicians, associate members of technical staff or whatever, but I’m talking about the MTS level and up. [21:25] So they would be loosely equivalent to PIs in the modern academic world, principal investigator or whatever. And in computing, I never would have had somebody who helped me with my stuff. Whereas if I were a physicist, I might have some number of people who would help me do experiments, look after the mechanics of depositing stuff on stuff, all those kinds of things that went on in the physical world. [21:54] But everybody was technically a Member of Technical Staff, even the management. But then there were department heads who’d manage first-level management, and then there were directors who were second-level management, and then there was executive director, and then there was vice president. But it was very flat in that sense. Most people did not want to be promoted because that would be seen as the end of their personal technical career, that it would move them away from the kind of work that they really enjoyed doing. [22:23] So being promoted was something to be avoided, not to be sought. And I think that went for quite a long time. Things did change, but I’m talking about the golden era of, call it the late ‘60s, ‘70s, early ‘80s, something like that. Ryan: [22:41] Did you and your peers ever think about career development in some way, or was it not even something you cared about? Brian: [22:52] Career development for myself as an individual, I never thought about it at all. I mean, usually I was having a good time and I was surrounded by lots of good people. Career development for the people, for example, when I was in first-level management, I was a department head for some years. I don’t remember much about how explicit it was, but there was some theory that you should actually be looking after the interests of the people in your department. [23:17] I think the main way that that would be reflected is understanding the work they were doing, really trying to understand what it was they were doing so that you could represent it fairly at things like merit review. Also so you could see opportunities to, oh gee, did you know Dave was working on this stuff? So that you could sort of cross-fertilize across the way to try and give them feedback, sort of say. [23:42] Are you sure this is gonna work? Or keep an eye on this, sort of guide them towards future success, but not telling them what to do. There was never any, this is what you have to do. There was no, there just wasn’t any, it wasn’t guidance at all. At most, there was a gentle gravitational pull towards stuff that would be useful or interesting. Ryan: [24:04] So you mentioned you were a head at some point and you managed some reports. You never had a report that was saying, “I want to grow in some way,” or they’re kind of hustling, kind of pushing you some way? Brian: [24:19] There were a handful of people I could remember who wanted to be in management. That was unusual, but there was nothing wrong with it. It’s just that being in research management, because the structure was so flat, it would take probably quite a while before you would move up. If you really wanted to be in management, you probably wanted to move into a different organization, development organization, where the rules of engagement and so on were much different. [24:48] And there were several, I shouldn’t say several, but at least a handful of people who were interested in that kind of advancement. And they went into development type jobs, which are perfectly fine, just different in a lot of ways. And there they had much more traditional responsibilities of management, including looking after their people. But I think the research operation was much more a bunch of cats and you can’t really herd them. Ryan: [25:15] So what’s the story behind you becoming a manager in that kind of environment? Because it seems like it’s something everyone’s avoiding. Brian: [25:24] I had no desire to do it. And I was blandished a couple of times, “Wouldn’t you like to be a manager?” But it was in some other organization, even within research. And I always thought the group that I was in was special, probably was. And so I had no interest in being manager in some other part of it. And so I basically declined with thanks. But then it was, would you like to be a manager in your own organization? [25:51] And I wasn’t very enthusiastic, but okay. And they got lots of ways they can, you know, it’s inevitable. Why not now? Or, alternately, if you don’t do it now, it might never come, which is completely contradictory. Or if you don’t do it, somebody else not as good is gonna do it. So all of the usual stuff. And I finally succumbed, I think, in about ‘81. So I’d been there at that point, call it 12 years for real. [26:19] So that’s the first promotion. And it was okay, but it wasn’t as much fun, I think, because now I was responsible for roughly 10 people. Had to understand their work, which was all over the map, had to be able to talk to other people about it, had to go to more meetings. So it was okay, but it was not my favorite part of the job, really. Ryan: [26:43] How did you know your group was so special? Because when I look at it, it is in hindsight. I mean, I saw Bjarne was reporting to you, and of course, there’s Dennis Ritchie nearby and Ken Thompson. And you also mentioned other people like Doug McIlroy and Richard Hamming. So how did you know at that time that it was such a special group? Brian: [27:06] I think a lot of it was not so much knowing that the work they were doing was gonna prove to be in the future important, but that they were just really clearly smart and seemed to be doing things that were interesting and relevant. Most of us used the work that our peers did. Certainly all of the things related to Unix, we just used that. That was our computing environment. The languages that were developed, the tools that were developed, and so on, we used them. [27:34] And so you could get a sense of who’s doing stuff that actually matters to me. And so I think that was part of it. Extrapolating long-term effect, we’re not very good at that, or I certainly wasn’t, figuring out who were the ones who were gonna win Turing Awards. No, not really. 27:55 — The most impressive people he worked with Ryan: [27:55] You worked with so many legendary people. Was there anyone that, I guess, or any story of someone who kind of impressed you the most, or you thought, wow, their technical chops are just untouchable? Brian: [28:10] There’s several like that. Ken Thompson’s the obvious one, I think. Certainly the best programmer I’ve ever met, unparalleled. And the story is the first version of Unix where he’s got this little old PDP-7, which is an obsolete machine, has something like 8K 18-bit words. So it’s a tiny little machine. He’s been fooling around with something to drive the disk on it. And he’s thinking about how do you schedule disk operations so that it’ll go fast and stuff like that? [28:47] And his wife takes their young son off to California for 3 weeks, and he thinks, I could do something here. And so in 3 weeks he builds himself an editor, an assembler, and an operating system. And there you have it. Ryan: [28:59] By himself? Brian: [29:01] Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Ryan: [29:03] When I used to write, you go to Stack Overflow, or you look up how to write the code and then you write it. How does he do it without all that Internet resource? Brian: [29:17] Because he’s a boatload smarter than you and I put together. And this is before any of that stuff existed, right? This was 1969. And so he’s probably writing the code in assembly language, bear in mind, not any high-level language. And he’s doing it probably on some other machine just because it has some kind of text editor. And then he’s making paper tapes that he carries to this tiny little machine and loads them and sees what happens. Ryan: [29:43] Oh my God. Brian: [29:45] Yeah. So it’s going back into the mists of time, but three weeks and he’s got a working operating system. So I think that is a good example of somebody who’s just off-scale good at what they do. And there were a lot of people like that at the labs. I mentioned Doug McIlroy a number of times. He was my first internship. He was notionally my boss, and he was interested in storage allocators, ML kind of thing. [30:14] And so he set me to working on something, and I almost instantaneously went somewhere else, and he didn’t care. So I spent the summer doing something unrelated to that, and it seemed like it was fine because I got a come back next summer kind of offer. But he was the kind of guy who was exceptionally good at pretty much anything he wanted to do. I mean, Ken Thompson says Doug’s the smartest person he ever met. [30:41] So this is—we’re multiple levels above me at this point. But Doug was extremely goo
Brian Kernighan was one of my most consistently requested guests and so I was excited to have him on the podcast. He’s a former Bell Labs member of technical staff, co-author of the original C book, and the one who popularized “Hello World.” I interviewed him for all of his stories around the legendary place and the folks that worked there. I also did some extra digging for this interview to come up with some interesting tidbits to discuss. For instance, I found a post where someone used modern hardware to break the old encryption scheme they used back in the day. I read his old password back to him in the interview. I brought my gear and traveled to his office at Princeton. You can tell I shot it myself because my angle is out of focus for a large part of the episode. I figured out a better way to self-monitor after this episode so hopefully it doesn’t happen again. Hope you enjoy the episode! Check out the episode wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Timestamps 00:42 - What Bell Labs was and how he got hired 06:34 - Why so many inventions came from Bell Labs 14:15 - A day in the life at Bell Labs 27:55 - The most impressive people he worked with 33:50 - The AT&T film explaining Unix 39:46 - Why C was so influential 48:40 - What he misses most about Bell Labs 54:10 - Are LLMs bad for computer science education 01:01:46 - His 1972 commit in the Go repo 01:03:43 - Grace Emlen, the fake Bell Labs employee 01:07:39 - Why he writes so many books 01:19:58 - His favorite and least favorite languages 01:24:28 - Advice for students and young people Transcript 00:42 — What Bell Labs was and how he got hired Ryan: [00:42] Could you explain what Bell Labs was and what is the story behind you getting a job there? Brian: [00:55] So Bell Labs was like the research arm of AT&T. It was founded in, I think, 1923, ‘25, something like that. AT&T at that point was growing. It had absorbed a bunch of the local telephone companies across the whole country, and they realized that they just needed to understand things better so that they could improve service. So they set up a research operation, which was called Bell Telephone Laboratories. [01:23] It was in New York on West Street, and people did all kinds of things related to improving telephony. In 1963, something like that, in the early ‘60s, they basically moved the whole operation to New Jersey, northern New Jersey, a place called Murray Hill, near Summit and things like that. So call it 25 miles west of New York City. And that was a big operation. There were probably 3,000 people in one connected set of buildings doing research in all kinds of things. [02:02] Physics, semiconductor physics, devices like that, chemistry, optical fiber kinds of things, just all sorts of research. And then more on the soft end, there was mathematics and increasingly there was computers, computer-related things as they gradually came to the realization that computing was gonna be part of the future in some way or another. In the summer of 1966, I was a grad student here at Princeton, but I got an internship at MIT in Cambridge working in Project MAC, which was basically the Multics project. [02:39] And so I used CTSS, that first original timesharing system, done by Fernando Corbató and friends, to develop software for the Multics system, which was just starting up. And that was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it. I’m not sure I ever did anything that was very useful, but part of it was then the next year I got an internship at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. So I was still a graduate student, and that would be roughly the third year here, I got this internship at Bell Labs, and that was a lot of fun. [03:18] And I worked there, I worked actually with Doug McIlroy for the summer, came back here, continued to stall on doing my thesis work, which I guess is what one does. And then I got another internship in the summer of 1968, and there I worked with Shen Lin, and he and I worked on a problem which had been suggested by my advisor here. And this was graph partitioning. And he and I worked on it, and we came up with an algorithm that did a pretty decent job on part of it. [03:50] I came up with several special cases that you could do really well. And then I wrote up the thesis really quickly and escaped. Ryan: [03:57] Escaped Princeton. Brian: [04:00] Escaped from Princeton. I took a whole week off and went to Bell Labs because they’d given me a return offer, which was very sweet of them. And I stayed there then until roughly 2000 in the group that had done or was doing a variety of things. Ryan: [04:15] Did you consider other career opportunities at the time? Brian: [04:19] I think I didn’t consider any other option whatsoever. I mean, I had really enjoyed the summers. The two summers were great. The people were really, really nice and interesting. There was stuff to do. It was close. I didn’t have to go anywhere, as it were. And so I literally never considered anything else. I never had a job interview, nothing like that. I just went there. So it was kind of like falling down the fall line or something like that. [04:48] I think partly it was helped along by some sort of old boy network, where somebody here at Princeton knew somebody at Bell Labs, because there’s a lot of back and forth between the 2 institutions. And so I’m sure that kind of thing helped. It also helped, I think, at MIT that a guy who had had an internship the year before me had done a bang-up job for them. And so that probably said, well, these folks from Princeton are maybe okay. [05:17] So I’m grateful to him too. Ryan: [05:19] Nowadays, Bell Labs is so legendary, but at that time, what was the social perception? If I had talked to your peers and said, “Hey, what do you think of Bell Labs?” what would they have said at that time? Brian: [05:33] I suspect that it depended on the field, but probably for most of them, they would’ve thought, yeah, yeah, this is a really good place. Because in the physical sciences, it was obviously the powerhouse in a lot of respects. That’s where your transistor came from, for example. And a lot of things related to communications, that’s where information theory came from. It’s where error-correcting codes came from. [05:54] All of these things that were sort of critical advances in technology had come from Bell Labs. Bell Labs was a part of the scientific community. People who went to Bell Labs published in exactly the same journals and went to the same conferences, collaborated with people in the same universities. And so it was really an integral part, I think, of the scientific community at the time. And that was largely, I will say, the physical sciences kind of thing, but it obviously sort of spread out into other things that were peripherally related. [06:27] And certainly the mathematicians were absolutely first-rate as well. Tended to be applied mathematicians rather than theoretical ones. 06:34 — Why so many inventions came from Bell Labs Ryan: [06:34] Everything you just said there is an insane value for humanity, the transistor and all those other things. Why is it that so much of it came from one research lab tied to a company that today is not known for all these amazing innovations? Brian: [06:56] AT&T bankrolled all kinds of contributions that Bell Labs made. And I think the way it worked was that AT&T provided telephone service to essentially the whole country. I mean, maybe it was 80%, but it was a very substantial fraction of the whole country. And that meant that they had a pretty guaranteed revenue stream. Now it was regulated. They were a regulated public monopoly. That’s the jargon term. [07:20] And that meant that their rates were set or restricted or at least evaluated by lots and lots of agencies, states, and the federal government. So there was a limit to what they could do. The quid pro quo was they got sort of a guaranteed rate of return on their investment in whatever they did with the phone company. And the quid pro quo would be that they provided telephone service to essentially everybody. [07:47] Even if you were way out in the boonies or something like that, AT&T would provide this service. And they were able to rip off a small fraction of that. I will make up a number and say 1 or 2% of their pretty much guaranteed revenues to fund a research operation that would let them improve the service. And so that was the basic, call it financial arrangement. And the other thing is it was very stable. [08:11] You could sort of predict there would be this steady increase in revenues, but predictable in a way that would guarantee that there would always be money to do something. There was no competition because AT&T had essentially what amounted to this monopoly. And so that meant that they could take a very long view of what they were doing. And so if somebody had an idea and wanted to work on it for a year or 2 or 3, fine, go for it. [08:39] And if you’ve got a bunch of people doing this, even if your idea is dumb, my idea is dumb, somebody else might have a good idea. And so if you aggregate, the output would be probably something useful almost all the time. Ryan: [08:52] What gave this lab such recruiting pull, in your opinion? How did all the best people come to this place? Brian: [09:02] Well, I think it depends. For me, it was certainly happenstance, just blind luck, being in the right place at the right time, following people who had done something that in some way prepared the way. I think if you were a physicist getting your degree in physics at pick your favorite good university, where would you go to do physics? Well, the opportunities would fundamentally be government lab perhaps, or a place like maybe IBM or maybe Bell Labs. [09:31] And Bell Labs had a sterling reputation, well-earned, for doing exceptional work in that area. So that would be, let’s say, anybody doing physics, chemistry, materials, all of that kind of stuff. I think somewhat the same would be true of anything related to mathematics, especially the mathematics of communication or anything related to communication systems. I mean, that’s where Shannon was, that’s where Hamming was, Bode, Nyquist, all of those people before those. [10:00] So that kind of, again, tremendous reputation for the place. And as I said, they were part of the scientific community. It wasn’t like it was off on Mars somewhere, and it wasn’t like you went there and disappeared. You went there and you were a part of the broader community. And so I think the computing stuff came along and had some of the same advantages, but it wasn’t clear who the heroes were at that point. [10:23] It was early-ish, because remember, I went there in 1969. So computers were still pretty young at that point. Ryan: [10:30] A lot of those names you mentioned, I mean, they were in my textbooks when I was studying. And so they’re kind of the heroes and everything. But so at that time you’re saying your perspective was they were just kind of the lead on the team, but they weren’t the legendary computer scientists. Brian: [10:51] Well, it’s hard to say, and it’s not even clear what a computer scientist is, but you want a story? When I went to Bell Labs for my first internship, so call it the summer of 1967, and I was in an office that was sort of a little smaller than the one we’re sitting in now. But as a summer intern, for some accidental reason, I had an office of my own. This never happens, but it did happen. And so I’m sitting there on the very first day at about, roughly 11 o’clock in the morning, wondering what the hell do I do? [11:23] And this older guy came along, passed the door, and he said, “Hi, I’m Dick. Let’s go to lunch.” I said, okay. So I went to lunch with Dick. I never did get his name right. And so we had a nice lunch conversation. I don’t remember anything about it. And then he went off somewhere else. And I came back and went to the next door to me and looked at the name
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