This  level-5 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Companies Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Companies, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of companies on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.CompaniesWikipedia:WikiProject CompaniesTemplate:WikiProject Companiescompany Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. WikiProject Companies To-do: Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Article requests : Wikipedia:Requested articles/Business and economics/Companies Assess : Category:Unassessed company articles Copyedit : Category:Company articles needing attention Infobox : Category:Company articles needing infoboxes Maintain : Portal:Companies Stubs : Help expand stub articles located at Category:Company stubs Other : Tag company articles with the {{portal|Companies}} template Tag company talk pages with the {{WikiProject Companies}} project banner Answer requests for comments Computing: Software / Free and open-source software High‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing High This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale. This article is supported by WikiProject Software (assessed as High-importance). This article is supported by Free and open-source software (assessed as High-importance). New Jersey Mid‑importance This article is part of WikiProject New Jersey, an effort to create, expand, and improve New Jersey–related articles to Wikipedia feature-quality standard. Please join in the discussion.New JerseyWikipedia:WikiProject New JerseyTemplate:WikiProject New JerseyNew Jersey Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. Physics: History Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Physics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PhysicsWikipedia:WikiProject PhysicsTemplate:WikiProject Physicsphysics Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. This article is supported by History Taskforce. Telecommunications: Bell System Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Telecommunications, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Telecommunications on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.TelecommunicationsWikipedia:WikiProject TelecommunicationsTemplate:WikiProject TelecommunicationsTelecommunications Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale. This article is supported by the Bell System task force. Plan 9 (inactive) This article is within the scope of WikiProject Plan 9, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Plan 9Wikipedia:WikiProject Plan 9Template:WikiProject Plan 9Plan 9

The following reference(s) may be useful when improving this article in the future: The birthplace of the 20th century's brightest ideas (BBC)

Material from Bell Labs was split out into List of Bell Labs alumni on September 9, 2024 from this version. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists. Please leave this template in place to link the article histories and preserve this attribution.

Archives (Index)

2012 2015 2016 2017 2019 2021 2022 2023

This page is archived by ClueBot III.

Noticed a video was presented on a Bell Labs Facebook Group... about Neil deGras Tyson discussing area codes. Thanks for the video. He actually gave information that he was a summer intern at MH... So did an entry on Wikipedia.... "Neil deGras Tyson Summer Intern at Murray Hill Bell Labs. American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator." 2607:FB91:1C0F:C5C4:9A0A:96B4:911C:C820 (talk) 20:44, 6 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There were four individuals that had significant Bell Labs and NASA Aerospace Officials history. Mervin J. Kelly, Louis John Lanzerotti, Donald P. Ling, and Walter A. MacNair. https://history.nasa.gov/biosk-n.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.88.107.15 (talk) 04:27, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The TRADIC design team should be included into the alumni lists: Jean Howard Felker, James R. Harris, and Louis C. Brown ("Charlie Brown") — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.88.107.15 (talk) 21:28, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/famed-bell-labs-leaving-historic-headquarters-to-move-to-new-brunswick/ar-AA1lp7mG 67.249.53.128 (talk) 18:07, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

While scraping the internet for the unchanged sites of bell-labs, now Nokia Bell Labs, I discovered https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/ that was the (single, spontaneous) redirect from https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/, which only appeared once, and never redirected again.

containing: (and I quote) Unix papers and writings, approximately chronological

Unix Programmer's Manual, First Edition (1971) Page scan or Postscript (via OCR) of life before pipes or grep were invented. Notes for a Unix talk circa 1972 `The Unix Time-sharing System,' the 1978 BSTJ update of the 1974 C. ACM article by me and Ken Thompson originally describing Unix: browsable, or PostScript or PDF. `The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System,' an account of developments during 1968-1973. browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF A Memo from 1976 that proposes buying a machine to which to port Unix, and the kinds of changes that would be needed in C to make this possible. Although the memo itself is rather pro forma, it's important in Unix history. Bob Bowles found and scanned a Unix ad from 1981. See it now; it's not all that big. I found another, and Vincent Guyot supplied a Xenix version. Karl Kleine of Jena found and scanned an early Unix license agreement, and also two price lists for early 1980s systems. See an introduction here. The entire Seventh Edition Manual is available on-line, with not only the man pages but all the papers. (The sources for the entire system, plus earlier and some later ones are also available; see the links page.) `Portability of C Programs and the UNIX System,' by me and Steve Johnson is available in several formats. This link to early portability work collects not only this paper (in various formats) but also related papers by Richard Miller, Steve Johnson, Juris Reinfelds, Tom London and John Reiser on 32V, as well as later seminal work within Bell Labs on a variety of machines. `A Retrospective,' from AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, 1978. This link points to a short description of the circumstances, with sublinks to renditions of the article. `A Stream Input/Output System', from AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, 1984: browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF I wrote a couple of papers about experiences with Unix on a Cray X/MP. The link is to an HTML page with a little background; it contains sublinks to the papers. `Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System,' with D. L. Presotto, from Software--Practice and Experience, 19, June 1990. browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF An old picture of Ken, me, and some PDP-11s. From the company archives, with a little photointerpretation. Why Ken had to invent |  : some partially enigmatic advice from Doug McIlroy that dates to 1964. Some material from the Unix Tenth Edition Manual, published in 1990. This was the last Unix manual published by our group. The collection under the link is only a small part of the whole two volumes, and contains a few documents describing utilities that survived into Plan 9 but are not in its own manuals, notably pic and tbl. Some are just neat, like pico. C and its immediate ancestors

BCPL Reference Manual by Martin Richards, dated July 1967. The language described here supplied the basis for much of our own work and that of others. The linked page discusses the circumstances, while the files linked under it have the manual itself. Users' Reference to B, which describes the B programming language; it is by Ken Thompson and describes the PDP-11 version. CSTR #8 also describes the B programming language; it is for the GCOS version on Honeywell equipment. It is by Johnson and Kernighan. Resurrection of two primeval C compilers from 1972-73, including source. You won't be able to compile it with today's compilers, but the link points to someone who succeeded in reviving one of them. The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format. There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB.

No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A.

However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript or PDF format.

The structure and even many bits of wording of the manual survived into K&R I and thence into the ANSI/ISO standard for the language.

A Bell Labs CS Tech. Report (#102) by Steve Johnson and me discusses issues involved in designing a calling sequence for C on various machines. It is from 1981, and thus pre-ANSI, but the issues haven't really changed. Available as HTML, PDF, or Postscript. `The Development of the C Language', from HOPL II, 1993: browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF Angelo de Oliveira kindly supplied a translation into Portuguese of the paper; his own MS Word version is here, while this is Word's rendition of this into browsable HTML. An HTML browsable transcript of the talk I gave at HOPL II, with its slides. It's entitled "Five Little Languages and How They Grew" and it is quite different from the Development paper referenced just above. `Variable-size Arrays in C,' a proposal of mine that appeared in Journal of C Language Translation, but is not the approach adopted for the 1999 ISO C standard: browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF. The The C Programming Language book has a home page. It has acquisition information and the current errata list, and cover art from various translations. Interesting other things: architecture, editors, adventures

Thompson's Space Travel Game, a graphical entertainment that led Ken to find the PDP-7 that would become important. Dabbling in Cryptography, in which the author finds himself involved in stronger political forces and higher mathematical creativity than is his wont. Labscam: a story from 1989, whose protagonists are a show-biz duo, Plan 9 geeks, and a Nobel laureate. Historical notes (and a manual) on QED, the ancestor of the Unix ed and vi editors. VAX over 20+ years, our early impression of Digital's architecture, with an assessment from Usenet of 1988. Insider secrets: Values of beeta will give rise to Dom! A Letter from Washington, an account of the experience of receiving the National Medal of Technology. A brief article I wrote for ICGA Journal, the publication of the International Computer Games Association, recounting an appreciation of the synergy between Ken Thompson's activities in chess, other games, and systems. It includes a funny faked memo by Mike Lesk. Some court papers from the lawsuit brought by USL against BSDI, then the University of California, in the early 1990s about Unix intellectual property. These may be relevant today in view of SCO's recent actions.

And more, linked to bell labs’ historical data and history, as well as Dennis’ bibliography and such. This is, well, unexpected. Link (again if TLDR): https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/ Skylerbxz (talk) 06:52, 31 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

this has already been archived (the link) Skylerbxz (talk) 07:02, 31 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]