BELL Labs (formerly named AT&T Bell Laboratories, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Bell Labs) is an American research and scientific development company, owned by Finnish company Nokia.Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the operating systems Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and the PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES C, C++, and S.Unix was developed by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and JOE Ossanna in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center.Initially INTENDED for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties from the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial variants of Unix from vendors such as the University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), IBM (AIX) and Sun Microsystems (Solaris).