Tech Time Warp of the Week: How Bell Labs Recruited Computer Whizzes in the ’70s

Dennis Ritchie is gone. And Bell Labs is no longer the force it once was. But you can still visit them on the net.

In the classic video above, Ritchie is among those who pitch Bell Labs to potential recruits somewhere towards the tail end of its heyday, in the ’70s and on into the ’80s. It’s a small window into an operation that changed the world.

Bell Labs gave us the transistor, the basic building block for all modern computers. And later, Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson built the UNIX operating system and the C programming language, two things that provide the foundation for so much of the technology we use today, from the iPhone to massive web services like Google and Facebook.

The video comes from the American telephone giant then known as Ma Bell, the monopoly that would eventually gave way to companies like Verizon, the modern AT&T, and Alcatel Lucent, which runs Bell Labs today. It’s a far cry from the pitch engineers now get from the likes of Google and Facebook. But that’s part of its charm.

It doesn’t promise perks like ping pong tables or kegorators—those mainstays in the modern world of tech innovation. Instead, employees pitch more mature things like getting paid to complete a master’s degree in engineering and raising kids in Columbus, Ohio, where Bell Labs had a satellite office.

But the real pitch is the work itself. “The work is exciting,” Ritchie says, “because the people are exciting.” Yes, it feels like stock chatter. But history would prove him right, and today’s tech companies might be able to learn a thing or two from the old Bell approach.

That said, it wasn’t all work and no play at Bell. The video also shows off a little outdoor bowling. Think of it as the ping pong of its day.