Languages / Concept
Bell Labs
Murray Hill, New Jersey — where the 20th century was invented.
For a stretch of the 20th century, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was the most productive research institution the world has seen. The transistor was invented here (1947). So was information theory, in Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper. The laser, the solar cell, the CCD, and a shelf of Nobel prizes came out of the same corridors.
For this encyclopedia, one room matters most. In the early 1970s Ken Thompson
and Dennis Ritchie built Unix, and to make it portable Ritchie created
C. The same culture produced the shell, grep, awk, troff, pipes, and
the enduring philosophy of small tools that do one thing well and compose.
The whole aesthetic of this app — the teletype header, the aged paper, the green phosphor console — is a tip of the hat to that place and that decade.
See also: C.