I first went to Bell Labs, I think in 1967. 
I was. at the time, a graduate student in
computer science - except it was
before computer science. It was electrical
engineering
at Princeton and I was lucky enough to get
a summer job at Bell Labs. But it was a
wonderful place because there were an enormous
number of really good people,
doing really interesting things, and
nobody telling you what to do -
a kinda rewarding environment! And
so it was so good that when I graduated
from Princeton I didn't even interview
any other place I just said "OK
I'll go to Bell Labs. they offered me a job,
why not do it ?"  
And that was a decision that was extremely
lucky and I've never regretted it.
In one single large-ish building there
were probably four thousand people of whom
about 2,000 were probably PhD's in
various forms of
science: physics, chemistry, materials and then
on the - call it the "softer" end -
mathematics and
the relatively new field of computer
science at that point.
A large number of really, really excellent
people, and the environment was
"You can do anything you want" because
the revenue source for Bell Labs.
with very stable. It was part of AT&T
which, in effect, provided telephone
service for the whole country
and the way it did it ...  At that time AT&T 
was a regulated monopoly which meant they
had in effect a guaranteed rate of return
and they peeled a tiny piece of that off for
research to improve telephone service in
the country. That was the quid pro quo.
And because of that there was no shortage of
resources and no management direction that
said "You have to do something that will
save the company in the next quarter".
That was really
very satisfying and so most people worked
on things that were in some way
long-term
or, at least, whose immediate application
wasn't obvious. Hard to beat that
environment I think.
And I think I was there for over 30
years and I was never once told what I
should be working
on . And the way it worked was, at the and 
of each year
you had to write down on one side, of one
piece of paper, what you had done
during the year and they used that to
determine how much they'd pay you next year.
I was born in Toronto -
as almost everybody in Canada seems
to be and
I went to University at
University of Toronto and I was there
from '60 to '64
and then not knowing what to do, in the
best tradition, and not wanting to look
for a job, I went to graduate school
and so I wound up at Princeton, I think
largely because they made me
on the surface, and in retrospect really,
a better offer than some of the other
places that I had also applied to.
And that was a very good thing. I
actually enjoyed that and I met a lot of
good people and by pure luck
I landed this job at Bell Labs. The reason 
I landed the job there, I think, is that
the year before I had worked at MIT on
Project Mac, which was the very first
real .... It was the beginning of the 
MULTICS era
and they were using something called
CTSS - the Compatible Time-Sharing System
which was really the first time-sharing
system up. And so I had a good time 
that summer
and I met, indirectly, virtually all the 
people from Bell Labs. and so I
got lucky and got a job for a couple
of summers and that paid off
both in future contacts but also in giving me
something to do for my thesis. The original
computing world
- original? -  a long time ago, certainly when
I was an undergraduate, was that there
were big computers
sitting in rooms - air-conditioned rooms -
behind counters, looked after by operators.
And if you wanted to get something done
what you had to do
was take - usually a deck of cards - although
perhaps paper tape,
hand it to  an operator, and a long
time later
you would get your results, which of course
would be "It didn't work" and so you'd repeat it.
And so the idea of time-sharing was
to say let's make it so that here's this
computer, sitting there,
and, instead of feeding it cards by an
operator, let's connect
terminals to it. And these were mostly, at
that time, mechanical terminals,
like teletypes, not even VDT terminals.
And connect those and have the 
operating system
of the computer sort of give you a few
seconds, or
half a second, of time and give him a
half, and give her
a little bit. And just going round and round
the people who wanted
to do some kind of computing. Because
computers were, even then, much faster than
people, this actually gave everybody the
illusion that they had the whole computer to
themselves. So it was unbelievably
liberating. You could
type some stuff into a file
and it would remember it for you -  no 
punch-cards! And then you could say "Gee!
let me compile that file". And it would 
do that,
and a few seconds later the compilation would
be over. And no waiting for an operator
to give you
a piece of paper that said your compilation
failed: you found it right away. So then
you made a change
and did it again and so it was incredibly
more productive. You could do in a few
minutes something that might have taken
you a few days with the punch card
paper, operator, kind of mechanisms. That's
what time-sharing was,
if you like. So could you call that an
early version of Cloud Computing?
Perhaps you could. There's a central
computer it has the resources that were
information is being stored
and you're talking to it remotely. Maybe
not very remotely
but, given phone systems, it could be
really remotely. So in an early sense
you could say that was cloud computing.
>> SEAN: You've come round full-circle in some respects?
>> BWK: In some respects absolutely. The connection
was that MIT had done this system called CTSS
- very successful but of course very local - and
they decided that they wanted to do the
next thing which was
a computing utility which would provide
that same sort of wonderful service
to the world at large. Let's build a computing 
utility and to do that we need more
resources of time, money and especially people.
And so MIT enlisted two other
organizations to help them build this
thing, which was going to be called MULTICS - 
the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service.
One of those was General Electric which, at
the time made computer hardware -
seem strange - and the other was Bell Labs.
which had, at the time, a lot of
experience in operating system development
because they had built operating systems for
IBM computers, that were not IBM. And so
we had these three organizations MIT, GE
and Bell Labs, in three different places. One
was in Cambridge, Massachusetts one was in
Murray Hill, New Jersey and one was in
Phoenix, Arizona. You don't have to study
management theory very much to realize the
potential problems in
this sort of thing. So they worked on
MULTICS for probably three or four
years and at that point Bell Labs.
decided that it wasn't going
where it should go, fast enough. And they
withdrew from the project.
That was in late '68 - very early '69.
But up to that point people from Bell
Labs who had been involved in MULTICS were
had, y' know, really gotten used to time-sharing, 
understood that it worked really well
and had learned a lot of things about
how you develop operating systems, were
using high-level languages to do the
actual implementation of the operating
systems. They got a tremendous amount
of experience and a taste for really
good computing
and so when Bell Labs. pulled out it left people,
in particular Ken Thompson and Dennis
Ritchie, with a big hole:
"We'd like to do things this way but we can't
do it, what do we do?"
And then you go off to this well-told
story of Ken Thompson finding a
little-used PDP-7 upon which he built, in
a month,
an operating system. And the rest is UNIX
history.
At the time I was at MIT, which was
the summer of '66, I did not know Ken
at all. I met him, I think, then when I've
spent the summer of '67
at Bell Labs. and we were in the same organization
and I think Dennis arrived more or less at the
same time. I don't have clear memories of
that, and then
I went there permanently in the uh ... very
early in 1969, and we were all in the same
organization and so at that point I got
to know
them well ... still friends. Dennis unfortunately
died several years ago,
but I keep in touch with Ken at least sporadically. 
>> SEAN: that must have been quite something!
Summer of '69, you're there at Bell Labs.
What was the feeling there? Was it like working at one 
of these place that are so well-known for their innovation ...
>> BWK: Yes, it was an indescribably great
experience - it really was - because there
were so many people there
who were so good, and the environment was
totally open
and supportive. If you had a problem - it was
y'know, like the corridors of the building.
Everybody's office door was open. You
could say "I have a problem"
to anybody and they would try and help
you. They would drop whatever they were doing
and if somebody came into your office
you could, y' know,
try and help them with their problems.
If somebody had an idea they would talk
about it; people would gather in the
corners talking about ideas,
people would meet at lunch and talk about things
like that. Everything was totally open.
Certainly in the UNIX system, although they were
protections on files
in the file-system, people tended not to
use them. And certainly the source code
for the system was just sitting there
and you could
look at it. People had logins but
typically kept their directories totally
open. It was probably foolishly open in
some respects but ...
So if you wanted to see how a command worked
you could read the code. If you wanted to
change it - well go ahead and do it
And so, in that sense,
it was, within a narrower environment, a
precursor of
open source and, in the jargon of a few
years later, was 
"Ego-less programming"
in the sense that "I wrote the code but if
somebody else can do it better - go ahead"
I think typically that didn't happen a lot,
except by people who were working
together. So no way would I go in and
change Ken's implementation something in
the kernel.
No - not me! But
I remember going in and changing 
some stuff, adding
a sub-command to the the editor, 'ed',
at one point, just because there was
something I thought I could do better
that would be useful.
So, that kind of thing happened all the time.
So it was
a very very free, open
and incredibly ... wonderful experience
because you weren't told what to do, you
were just ... go do something.
I think part of it was the
environment - the environment was so
stimulating and there were so many
interesting things to work on.
I think in the background  ... AT&T remember
was providing
a telephone service for the whole country.
AT&T had well over a million employees
it was the biggest employer outside
the government at that time. And that meant
that it was a problem-rich environment
there were just
all kinds of things that you could work
on. And so
although there was nobody telling you
what to work on,
there was always, in the background, this
idea that "Gee! there's something
interesting there, we could do something
with that". And I think a lot of people, and
certainly for me, you would work on
something that had nothing obvious
immediately to do with
communications and then maybe you'd work
for a little while on something that did
have something, and you'd kinda cycle back
and forth
among these. Other people stayed fairly pure
on one side
of, y'know, "Let me ... let's do
mathematical type research"
and others were fairly hard-core "Let's
do something that's
directly related to the telephone
business" - all the time.
But remember the research part although it was
- call it 1500 to 2000 people - was actually a tiny,
tiny fraction of the whole company. So in
some sense it didn't matter as long as
this collection of people produced things
that were useful.
And they had produced, over the years,
things that were useful. The transistor comes
to mind as just something that was useful.
And some of the early work on lasers was
done at Bell Labs. Zone refining
which makes semiconductors actually
practical - all of these things came out
of Bell Labs. And, of course, lots of interesting
things in communications as
well. So, given an environment like that -
and where everybody is better than you are -
you don't slack. You try and keep up with
them ....
I never succeeded but it was a lot of fun!
