Mar 1 2019
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Two videophones from the early 1970s that were produced by AT&T/Bell Labs and the now-defunct Western Electric will…
Dec 12 2017
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Oct 1 2015
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Professor Brian Kernighan is computing heavyweight: he worked at Bell Labs, helped develop Unix and was one of two…
Jul 30 2015
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Jul 29 2015
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Just 45 miles outside New York City in Murray Hill, New Jersey sits Bell Labs: the birth place of lasers,…
Jun 22 2015
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We’ve been imagining a future of ubiquitous videophones for over a century. And today it’s considered no big deal…
Apr 21 2015
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A semi-rural New Jersey community about 45 miles outside of New York City seems like an unlikely home for the most…
Apr 1 2015
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Back in the good ‘ole days before the internet and Yo and Meerkat and Snapchat, we had one way to talk to people in…
May 20 2014
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In 1964, a pair of Bell Labs researchers in New Jersey pointed the world's largest radio telescope to the skies and…
May 5 2014
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Inside Bell Labs almost 70 years ago, the invention that defined the 20th century was born: The transistor. On a…
Jan 20 2014
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Martin Luther King's 1956 tips for riding integrated buses, examining how design has helped an Alabama county, building instant cities in Accra and instant skyscrapers in Mumbai, and how two New York architects are tearing down the work of their former friends. It's all this week in our favorite Urban Reads.
Oct 24 2013
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Think Apple’s forthcoming Cupertino headquarters is the first corporate space ship to touch down in America? Not so:…
Aug 28 2013
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The videophone is one of those technologies that more or less snuck up on us. Promises that one day you'd not only…
Jun 3 2013
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Every camera you've ever used in your life has a lens that focuses incoming photons on to a light-sensitive surface.…
Apr 3 2013
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Forty years ago today, senior Motorola engineer Marty Cooper made one very important phone call. From midtown…
Aug 28 2012
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Why Xerox never chose to capitalize on the groundbreaking GUI developments made at its Palo Alto Research Center…
Apr 12 2012
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They're a waste of paper these days, but back in 1977 the Yellow Pages were an essential communications tool. And in…
Apr 6 2012
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In 1964, two researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories were desperately attempting to pin down a source of…
Mar 29 2012
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In 1937, the notion of beaming radio waves off distant objects was barely more than speculation, yet in just six…
Sep 16 2011
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If I asked you about your phone, would you call it a cell phone or a mobile phone? Does it really matter what you…