[Iridescent_]

Read it too, and I had a similar feeling. To me it was the thought that we will probably never see a place like Bell labs -a temple to knowledge, to gather great minds and let them work on whatever they think might have interesting outcomes, no matter how long it takes to obtain results and without having to worry about short-term financial issues. Now researchers -in my country anyways- are forced into mostly researching ways to obtain funding and doing a little bit of actual research, almost as a side gig.

[phicoh]

As far as I know, the Unix group has to promise to build a document processing system to get the pdp-11 they needed.

Building Unix was a specific non-goal of Bell Labs as a result of their experience with Multics.

It was the perseverance of the Unix group that made them get the resources they needed.

[Cthulhu_]

Google had (has?) a similar platform, but it had nowhere near the same success as Bell Labs did. They did launch some products but a lot of them failed.

[fuzztester]

Is that Google X or some other unit?