AT&T is shutting down the research lab at Cambridge University that it bought from Olivetti. Yet another sad story in the demise of corporate R&D. For all the bad things you can say about Microsoft, one of the good things the company does is pour a lot of money into pure research. They pay a lot of smart people to just sit around and think. It’s a shame to see a working lab like the Cambridge Lab get shuttered. The lab is probably best known among geeks for creating VNC.