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Originally Posted by bgadow
It would be interesting to me to know just how things went down at "ground level" both at places like the Sarnoff Lab & at GE Portsmouth, which I guess didn't last long, either.
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It took about a year fo GE management to get around to the Sarnoff Lab. They were busy with the Indy consumer electronics siteand Bloomington manufacturing plant, along with the various defense contractor and space divisions. GE wanted NBC and the areospace stuff, and wasn't that excited about having consumer electronics and the Sarnoff R&D lab. As well as a security camera division in Landcaster PA and other such. And there was RCA semiconductor. Ever go to a swap meet or garage sale, and see a box full of stuff you want, but it has other stuff you don't really want, but the seller says you gotta take the entire box? "R&D lab? We don't need no stinkin R&D lab!" At the time NJ was trying to promote the Princeton NJ area as "Silicon Valley east coast", and the Sarnoff Lab was a flagship of this. Various local politicians got GE to not just shut the lab down. GE gave the lab away to some place called "SRI" Standford Research Institute IIRC as a tax writeoff. Then they canned about half of us. The place was a great place to work, invented a bunch of patents (mostly mundane small stuff, but I get to brag that I have 13 patents!), and most of us hung around betting that the place would survive. If this was a "friendly" takeover, I'd hate to see a hostile takeover. We were essentially raped and pillaged.
Haven't bought anything from GE since....