Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories are research and development laboratories, branch of Alcatel-Lucent, a French multinational company.
Bell's headquarters are in Murray Hill, New Jersey, United states.

History

Founded in 1925 from Western Electric Research Laboratories and from the department of engineering of AT&T, they were joined together with the purpose to form the Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc.

At the beginning Bell Labs were just developing equipment and structures for Western Electric, that after were produced by other companies of Bell's property. Since its foundation, Bell Labs made a lot of discovers in different field. The most interesting for us are the UNIX operating system, and programming languages like C and C++, but also transistors, lasers and other stuff.

During '70 and '80 Bell concentrate its work in computer science. Their work made a revolution in Informatics. In 1970 Dennis Ritchie created the programming language called C, which was then used to rewrite UNIX (before it was written in assembly), another innovative operating system which revolutionized computer's world.

In 1983, Bjarne Stroustrup extended C language creating C++.
In the mid of the '80, Bell Labs start a new project called Plan 9. It was a new operating system created from UNIX with the aim of replacing it. Plan 9 was not released until the begin of the '90.

In 1984 because of divestiture agreement with the U.S. Government, AT&T Corp. divested itself and the Bell System ceased to exist as it was known. During the golden age of Bell labs, over 25'000 people were employed, included 3,300 PhDs.

The projects developed inside Bell Labs led to 7 Nobel prize, that suggests the quality of these laboratories.

Operating System

UNIX

Unix is a operating system developed at Bell Labs. UNIX operating system exist in many variants. It is characterized by the "Unix philosophy", which means that every command has a defined function, with the presence of a filesystem, a shell scripting and command language.
Originally written in assembly, was then rewritten in C. AT&T sold Unix's licenses, which led to the development of many different version of UNIX.

Programming Languages

C

C is a programming language associated with UNIX OS, which was used for its development. Based on a language called BCPL, before to get C language the engineers created the B Language(1970), which was also used as a base for C.
Started in 1972, the project was publish just in in 1978. In 1983 the American National Standards Institute, described a comprehensible definition C.

C++

C++ is a result of Bjarne Stroustrup Ph.D. thesis. After the Simulta 67 language, Bjarne started working with C, in particular he started working with "C with Classes". His purpose was to create a object-oriented programming language based on C language.
In 1983 C changed name into C++. Many new features were added, like virtual functions, function overloading, references ("&"), and the possibility to insert comments.
In 1985 C++ was published and began to being sold.