[dnamlin]

Bell Labs was active in this area going all the way back to the 1930s, where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field.

Also in this era, once you got a job at Bell Labs, then you were set for life...not getting filthy rich necessarily, but you could fully expect to spend your entire career with the one prestigious, stable, monopoly-supported employer, before retiring with a nice pension. As a result, the rank-and-file talent were happy to move and settle down in the towns surrounding these giant suburban/exurban campuses, which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.

[chiefalchemist]

Aside from solid pay, you also got to work with some very smart people, of diverse nationalities. My father worked for Western Electric (at the location outside of Princeton, NJ). WE's role was to take the BLs' R&D and make it market-worthy. While he didn't have an advanced degree, many of peers did, and his bosses PhDs. His co-workers were Asian, SE Asian, and Mexican. This was long before diversity was all the rage.

When I was a kid - early 70s give or take - they'd have an annual open house for the families. I still remember being introduced to computers. I remember seeing fiber and hearing "this is the future" when all there was was copper twisted pair.

It didn't realize it then but I was a lucky SOB :)

[r_klancer]

Can confirm. That was the life. (My Dad worked at Holmdel until the divestiture.)

I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out.

Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast.

Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org).

Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.)

There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers.

But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus.

[graderjs]

Hearing this I wonder where will be the next center of tech when people in the future say the same about SV

[uni_rule]

I presume wherever it is cheap and conventional without scaring off the workers themselves. I would've said Austin, TX as it was being groomed to be such a place but I am no longer sure about that partly because of how partisan it gets around there scaring off the programmers and partly because half of that was Elon betting on that location back when he had credibility.

Who knows what's next? Upstate NY maybe? Lots of cult bunkers there, might mesh positively with some of those weird almost cultish philosophies some of the more new-age SV tech companies seem to push.

[walrus01]

> which also had excellent public schools thanks to the affluent tax base and high concentration of engineer/scientist parents.

Sounds a bit like the lifestyle from the late 1940s onwards for those in professional/scientific/research/engineering careers living in Los Alamos, NM or Oak Ridge, TN. Or the workforce for things like the Lincoln Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, etc.

[walrus01]

> where its relative isolation was ideal for radio astronomy -- in fact, one can reasonably claim Holmdel as the origin of that field.

Fun things like the Holmdel Horn Antenna too:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=holmdel+h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmdel_Horn_Antenna

Used for some of the earliest attempts at transatlantic C-band communications via geostationary satellites.

In the history of geostationary telecom satellite stuff the teleports near Holmdel are fairly important.

One of the other nearby noteworthy facilities is the giant teleport on Staten Island. Now all of the antennas and facilities have been removed and it's a vacant lot.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/17/nyregion/staten-island-te...

[graderjs]

I wish companies provided these sorts of opportunities today :)