AT&T archives

[kevm14]

These are great.

Here's one from 1961: Seeing the digital future. The punch card dialer is a riot. But the last 5 minutes (vision into the future) is more interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avHo0-qU8xo

And here's another from 1940 on vacuum tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-JzxX75oYc

[kevm14]

Another good AT&T archives short interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkUrg05DzEY

In this 1976 interview, a Bell Telephone newsmagazine reporter talks with former executive and scientist John Robinson Pierce about his vision of the future.

His broadband prediction was pretty amazing, though maybe not if you were a Bell Labs scientist.

[kevm14]

Genesis of the transistor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiQvGRjrLnU

To see more from from the AT&T Archives, visit http://techchannel.att.com/archives

In the late 1940s, Bell Laboratories scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, the first solid-state amplifier or switch, and in doing so laid the foundation for all modern electronics and circuitry. The three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the achievement. It may be the most important invention of the 20th century.

This 1965 film shows footage of them reunited/recreating their 1940s lab time to show how it was done, but in real life they had parted. Bardeen had left the labs in 1951 for the U. of IL; Shockley in 1956 to run a semiconductor company in California (laying the groundwork for Silicon Valley), and Brattain retired in 1967 to Whitman College.

Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ

[kevm14]

UNIX!

1982.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

[kevm14]

Optical maser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuORqMb481k

1963 description of the laser.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Laser

Imagine that.