50sEngineer

Clean living, excercise, and a good dog.

• Not quite ready to answer that, but one of the most amazing is the incredible shrinking of the storage space required...Moore's law!

-I don't remember any that really fizzled...although the signature verification work I did didn't have many practical applications. People just didn't seem to like it as a security device.

-Can't think of any right now

-Unimaginable. Look at the last ten years...could you believe it where we are now? Certainly miniturization will continue. [EDIT: More...] One of the most amazing things is to have gone from the huge rooms of tape decks whirring away to the laptop this is being typed on right now. And it has 100x the capacity of those huge old computing systems! It's an amazing multiplication of capacity...exponential, almost.

-The SOSUS work was the most profoundly positive thing for not only Bell Labs, but the country. A big factor in the winning the cold war. It was passive sonar installations that allowed tracking of Soviet submarines in the atlantic. Passive meaning they just listened, didn't send out signals--they were quiet. We knew where all the Russian submarines patrolling off our coast were, and they couldn't do anything about it. [more on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS]

[About the number of questions he's been asked] Where did all these people come from? Wow...

Because it's so much better.

It's more versatile and user friendly. The whole thing about Steve Jobs was that he wasn't an inventor, but that he was a "tweaker"...he took things that other people invented and tweaked them into something fantastic.

If some of the people asking are interested in more in depth information [It's very technical, but interesting if you're a tech guy!] I can e-mail you a detailed description of my years working at Bell Labs.