Why did Bell Labs produce so many inventions, according to Brian Kernighan?

Brian Kernighan told Ryan Peterman the answer was money and stability. AT&T provided phone service to most of the United States as a regulated public monopoly, with rates overseen by states and the federal government in exchange for a near-guaranteed return. That let it divert what Kernighan guessed was one or two percent of predictable revenue into research. With no competition, the lab could take a very long view: anyone with an idea could work on it for years, and across many people some ideas paid off.

• Kernighan said Bell Labs had about 3,000 people in one connected set of buildings at Murray Hill, New Jersey, about 25 miles west of New York City.
• The transistor, information theory and error-correcting codes all came out of Bell Labs, which published in the same journals as universities.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Ryan Peterman (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →

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