Bell Laboratories has a long and impressive history. The research and development arm of Alcatel-Lucent and, before that, AT&T, Bell Labs was founded in 1880 by Alexander Graham Bell with money he received from the French government for inventing the telephone. Over the years, a number of revolutionary technologies -- the transistor, the laser, the UNIX operating system, the C++ programming language -- have come out of Bell Labs. In the 1960s, Lawrence Harley Luckham worked at Bell Labs and, one day, he took a camera to work.

Luckham provides some context:

In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women except for the programmers who were all men. For some reason only one of them was around for the pictures that day.

These photographs have been reprinted with permission of Larry Luckham. All of the captions are original. Visit his personal website for more background information.

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