Bell was an industrial R&D lab. To an industrial R&D lab, the mission is everything.
If a company/country/person is rich enough, there is spare cash available so that all employees are not required to bring in an income from all their activities. In other words, there is enough slack in the system that some (a lot!) of work is done that is unfruitful and maybe, a complete waste of money and resources. But even there, it not really wasteful because we now know what doesn't work!
It's the old 'Half of every advertising Dollar is wasted'. BUT WHICH HALF?? You have to spend ALL of that dollar on advertising to gain the benefit. Same with R&D, you'll never know in advance which bit of R&D will bring in the billions in 20 years time.
Read up on the early years of UNIX at Bell Labs. That will bring the best story of 'WHY?' and 'HOW?' to view. It's often said that UNIX came about because the hackers (original meaning of 'hackers') wanted to be able to play SpaceWar.
If a company/country/person is rich enough, there is spare cash available so that all employees are not required to bring in an income from all their activities. In other words, there is enough slack in the system that some (a lot!) of work is done that is unfruitful and maybe, a complete waste of money and resources. But even there, it not really wasteful because we now know what doesn't work!
It's the old 'Half of every advertising Dollar is wasted'. BUT WHICH HALF?? You have to spend ALL of that dollar on advertising to gain the benefit. Same with R&D, you'll never know in advance which bit of R&D will bring in the billions in 20 years time.
Read up on the early years of UNIX at Bell Labs. That will bring the best story of 'WHY?' and 'HOW?' to view. It's often said that UNIX came about because the hackers (original meaning of 'hackers') wanted to be able to play SpaceWar.