Not what I was expecting based on the domain name!

This is a good article as far as it digs, but it misses an important fact of government regulation that allowed the things it reported as from government and private cooperation.

Bell Labs existed largely because AT&T as a huge monopoly was under a consent decree that it could not leverage its technology outside the telecommunications industry. From that internal research and development branch of the company came the transistor, the laser, the communications satellite, the photovoltaic cell, the charge coupled device, underseas communication cables, the MOS transistor, the vocoder & voder (earlist audio codecs), modern cryptography, information science including binary encoding systems, zone melting for semiconductor purification, FET transistors, the electret microphone, OFDM encoding, Unix, C, SNOBOL, Awk, AMPL, C++, optical fiber, TDMA phone network, the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect, laser cooling, SONET optical communications network, DSL, quantum factorization, W-CDMA communications, and one of the earliest de facto standard books on compilers (the Dragon book, in multiple editions).

The above list is incomplete. Imagine the modern world without one company gifting so many inventions and discoveries to the world. Oh, and they also happened to discover the cosmic microwave background in case you’re more of an astronomy buff than a computer geek.