Certainly the funding from the monopoly allowed the Labs to hire the best and turn them loose on problems that didn't have immediate potential. This translates to "get a bunch of PhDs in a room and turn them loose, pretty soon you have a world-beating operating system that will last for decades"

There are books by Labs people which give a pretty good picture of the atmosphere. Jon Gertner's "The Idea Factory" is one, Michael Noll's "Memories: A personal History of Bell Telephone Laboratories" is another.

Hire good people, guide them into creative work, and utilise the results. Contrast with Xerox PARC where the Corporate Overlords had a very restricted view of the business they thought they should be in.

Ultimately, The Telephone Company had a similar problem -- they had a huge capital investment in the telephone infrastructure and so were unable to pivot to the new data-centric world. Still, the remains of The Phone Company seem to be exploiting the same weakness as it applies to the old cable TV providers. I saw Verizon pulling new fiber cables down the main street of my home town. One might assume that it's for more Internet bandwidth.

I lived that book! Not on that project, I worked in Comm and Networking. One of my designs was a terminal server board for the MV8000. I knew a lot of the guys in the book, and worked with some of them on later projects.

My copy of SoaNM has Tom West's signature stamp on the flyleaf -- he made it know that he wasn't going to sign copies, so a couple of us came in hearly, found his signature stamp on his secretary's desk, and saved him the effort. He later managed the joint development of the DG/One with Nippon DG.

Orange carpet for life.

It could hardly be worse...

Could have been worse...
- Italians or French (known for their scrupulous obedience to traffic laws)
- British (left? right? It's OK, guvnah!)

Worse, the backup lights are not next to the backup camera, so reflectors don't show up at night (because they reflect in a narrow beam back to the light source).

My finger size is incompatible with screen keyboards. My patience is incompatible with autocarrot.

Why, yes, I am typing this on an IBM Model M.

CSB: years ago, I was responsible for character generator and keyboard design for foreign keyboards. It's not all QWERTY, and you haven't lived until you've tried to type an (English) email to your boss on a French AZERTY keyboard!

My Toyota RAV4 and Jeep Wrangler both use "projector" single bulb incandescent headlights. Subjectively, they are far dimmer than the old sealed beam reflector units we used to drive with.
How did the US go from headlights you could drive with to headlights you can't see with, to LED headlights that blind you even on "low beam"?

I very much dislike screen keyboards. I use a tablet to read books and for very limited browsing, but never browse on my iPhone. That's for phone calls, texting and the various apps I use.

Browsing on an iPhone is a pain, because no ad blockers. My fingers are far too fat for the keyboard, autocarrot chooses poorly and the multiple keyboard mode switches to enter numbers and symbols is wearisome.

Give me my IBM Model M and a full size screen any day.

Yeah, I know, it's all about the Benjamins. But JFC, the FBI just busted a huge SIM farming operation, claimed it was the Chinese trying to bring down the cell infrastructure, and here we have a US company doing pretty much the same thing "legitimately" (while the other hand tries to implement STIR/SHAKEN to *prevent* this sort of thing)

I'm sure many corporate "leaders" are thinking that way -- "let AI do it cheaper". Since the old way of working your way to the top seems to have gone by the boards, now they just want to hire experienced workers...and pay them entry level wages...

The illogic of the above approach probably doesn't even dawn on these Captains of Industry.

So glad our government is concentrating on the important stuff. Wars (of the flame variety) have been fought over fonts. All I need to say here is "Comic Sans".

...and the lucky ones use fiber instead of antiquated coax systems.

C'mon, Microsoft -- you had ONE JOB!

Words fail me here. A company whose core business is an operating system for a single user personal computer, and has had 30 years to perfect it, can't update it without significantly breaking it?

Maybe they should explore other occupations...

Time to run the cleaning ferret through the tubes again...

...and the error page helpfully provides a link to Cloudflare's site for more information...which is also unavailable