I came across a big research lab from the 90s that I didn't know about so I decided to blog about it: 📝 Interval Research Corporation: a 90s PARC without a Xerox

"Our research is kept secret" 🤮

6 papers: https://web.archive.org/web/19971012120857/http://www.interval.com/papers/ 50 million USD per paper 😛

What a great article Mariano, you should have pitched it to Wired! I had never heard of this lab, which is surprising when they were putting out bangers like "Enterprise: an experiment in journalism, developing a prototype of a business magazine on CD-ROM." 😂 In all seriousness it does appear that they failed because they were too detached from actual needs. If you compare to Bell Labs, yes it was very insulated but it still had this constant trickle up of problems that customers and engineers were actually facing on the ground.

Counterpoint: the real reason they've completely failed to achieve anything is that they're trying to make money off basic research, which is actually a public good.

@Chris Knott thanks, half the content is from the wired article linked at the bottom, so they did the great work in 1999 😄 , I just extracted the useful parts and mixed them with content from the archived Interval site