raptor: Stanford Research Institute in Menlo, right? As far as Bell Labs goes, my dad got his start with JPL in Pasadena, and his team did some collaborative work with Bell Labs. Talk about amazing places; Bell undoubtedly mirrors PARC for sheer cranial horsepower.
One of the projects my dad worked on was the avionics and telemetry for the F-4 Phantom, including the countermeasures package. This put him in contact with the “Skunk Works” boys out in the high desert. He said the 6 – 7 months he worked with them was the high point of his career. We got to travel out to Beale once to see the SR71 take off. Amazing aircraft, especially given the fact that the thing leaked like a sieve when it was on the ground.
That period between the late 1950s and the 1980s was a very fertile time for technological innovation. I don’t know if we will every see anything like that again.
