[JMS] Fw: The end of an era...

[JAMES HANLON]

Lawrence,

Thanks very much for the post!  It is very interesting, and I had not heard that the old "Black Box" at Holmdel was scheduled for demolition.  An interesting bit of trivia about the building - it was first scheduled to be finished with semi-silvered glass panels that would have made it look like a large, shining, silver box.  However the silvering available was uneven, and the first panels that went in place made the outside wall look tarnished.  So they switched to a dark, smoked glass instead.  Ever after, Holmdel was known as the "Black Box," a term often used by Electrical Engineering students of the era for describing circuits whose interior detail was unknown and whose characteristics could only be measured at their outside terminals.  There were even a few doctored pictures floating around Bell Labs of the Holmdel Lab showing two pairs of terminals at opposite ends of the building.  

I worked for Bell Labs from 1962 to 1989 in Whippany and Murray Hill, NJ, Allentown, PA, and finally Columbus, OH.  During that time I made many visits to the labs in Holmdel.  I transferred to Sandia National Labs out here in Albuquerque, NM, at the end of '89 when Bell Labs was "downsizing" my organization in Columbus.  Sandia was managed by AT&T at that point, so I was able to do what amounted to an in-company transfer, thank God!  I retired from Sandia in 2003 with 38+ years of experience and a very generous pension.  From what I have heard, I was far more lucky than many of my colleagues who stayed with Bell Labs at the time that I left.  

73,

Jim Hanlon, W8KGI