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How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
Famous ideas and technology like information theory, communications satellites, solar batteries, transistors, and countless other communications-related innovations trace their origins back to Bell Labs in one way or another. Systems engineers did not technically do anything that you wouldn’t hope would happen with a culture of collaboration, but they were the people that made finding the “one or two in a thousand” problems relevant to Bell and converting them into successful business applications “essentially automatic.” The first step was to dust off Doug Ring and Rae Young’s short 1947 memo to the FCC — two decades before — in which they proposed a non-obvious, very efficient (albeit hypothetical) system in which Bell could use the radio spectrum.
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