[pokler]

Really? Just off the top of my head, here are some of the people that worked at Bell Labs:

Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, William Shockley, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, John Hopcroft & Brian Kernighan. (I am probably forgetting several Nobel prize and Turing award recipients)

[racer-v]

Some people at the time felt that C and Unix were a setback to computing compared with Lisp, in the same way that Microsoft Windows was a setback compared to Unix. Bell Labs is the canonical example of "Worse is Better", also called the "New Jersey Philosophy".

One could also argue that both Windows and Unix were necessary phases for general computing given limited hardware resources, and only now is the stateless functional paradise envisioned at MIT in the 1960's actually possible.

[hollander]

Progress comes in waves. Windows might have been a set back from Apple, but it was more easily available.

[OrganicMSG]

RAND corporation in both depth and longevity is pretty impressive.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/a/asimov_isaac.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/v/vonneumann_john.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/n/nash_john_f.html

https://www.rand.org/about/history/nobel/bibliography.html

[coldtea]

Well, Shannon yes.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan, on the other hand, aren't of the same caliber as people like Shannon and Feynman (and the Manhattan project all-stars).

They've had a huge influence on programming, and on IT, but not always for the better from an academic and quality perspective (e.g. Worse is Better), and more as pragmatic hackers and tinkerers than deep thinkers.

[Avshalom]

While their practical achievements have had tremendous affect on a specific level of a revolutionary industry: Von Neumann alone was smarter and more influential than any three of them combined (maybe excluding Shannon).

To be fair that's also true of almost any three people involved in the Manhattan Project too.

[di4na]

Not a maybe for Shannon. He is still having a trememdous impact. Information theory has developed by Shannon is so fundamental that we forget about it these days. But big.

I could argue for Shockley and Hamming, but they were more on an engineering side.

[IAmEveryone]

Did they work there at the same time? What were the respective team sizes.

I get the feeling the Manhattan Project is pretty high up with regard to Nobel Prizes / Scientists employed, at least if you count only the research team at the Los Alamos site (the total team was in the 6-digits IIRC because of "Computers", Military staff, and all the physical work of enrichment and metalworking)

I think there's one school in Budapest that might have more laureates among an even smaller student body. Coincidently (or not) there's a rather large overlap of that group an Los Alamo (.