The Nokia logo was also redesigned last year to represent a pivot away from making smartphones. Nokia acquired Bell Labs in 2016 as part of its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent.
A lot of good tech came out of Bell Labs back in the day, including Unix, which eventually led to Linux. Nokia used to make solid hardware. I wonder if there’s anything great left in these organizations.
Unix isn’t even one of their biggest inventions, bell laboratory is responsible for transistors, solar panels, and lasers.
Don’t forget the bell.
Aren’t they also tangentially responsible for finding the CMB?
In 1964, David Todd Wilkinson and Peter Roll, Dicke’s colleagues at Princeton University, began constructing a Dicke radiometer to measure the cosmic microwave background.[29] In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Crawford Hill location of Bell Telephone Laboratories in nearby Holmdel Township, New Jersey had built a Dicke radiometer that they intended to use for radio astronomy and satellite communication experiments.[27] On 20 May 1964 they made their first measurement clearly showing the presence of the microwave background,[30] with their instrument having an excess 4.2K antenna temperature which they could not account for. After receiving a telephone call from Crawford Hill, Dicke said “Boys, we’ve been scooped.”[2][31][32] A meeting between the Princeton and Crawford Hill groups determined that the antenna temperature was indeed due to the microwave background. Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.[33]
Lmao, another TIL.
I fear their business model is just suing everyone over patents now. Many of their suits have been cited as holding telecommunications methods hostage without negotiating fair use licensing fees.
What a pity.
Nokia’s currently a telecom company which, among other things, licenses 5G tech.
Highly recommend The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner. It is a fantastic book about Bell Labs in its heyday.
Nokia is actually trying to block Reddit’s IPO over patent infringement:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-says-nokia-accused-it-patent-infringement-2024-03-19/
My Dad worked for Alcatel-Lucent when they got bought out by Nokia, which is when I found out it’s apparently pronounced “Noy-kia” and not “No-kia” like I thought it was for the longest (or else my Dad was just mispronouncing it). I’m sure there was some big changes he saw, but he pretty much worked from home the entire time, so it wasn’t a big transition that we saw, he just did the same old job, though I think they did move their actual offices from the East side of town to the North-west. He worked with them up until 2019 when he retired.
I’d think it’s obvious it’s not pronounced like an English word, since it’s Finnish brand named after a city in Finland…?
TIL Nokia isn’t Japanese.
Wtf
