In 1925, the Engineering Department of Western Electric was incorporated as Bell Telephone Laboratories. Bell Laboratories was established in order to "do everything it can to advance the art of communication and assure and improve the technical future of the Bell System, whose cornerstone of technical achievement was innovation and evolutionary insight. In 1941 the Laboratories moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey which later became corporate headquarters and the center for most of the Labs research (Mabon).

Bell Labs was involved in many "firsts." In the 1930s Dr. George R. Stibitz of Bell Laboratories developed the Complex Number Calculator. This calculator was the first electrically operated digital computer in the United States (Mabon). In 1940 Stibitz conducted the first online interaction in a demonstration at Dartmouth College, which connected computers at Dartmouth to computers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In the early 1950s Bell Labs designed and built the first "general-purpose" transitor computer for the Air Force. According to Ruth Davis, around 1950 Bell Labs developed its first time-sharing system (Lilley and Trice).

During World War II, Bell Labs developed complex systems for the control of weapons of war. The institute was also involved in radar development. Bell Labs handled over 1200 major projects for the National Defense Research Team. After the war, Bell Labs worked on many communication systems with NASA and helped the Atomic Enery Commission (AEC) design, fabricate, produce, and store atomic weapons (Mabon).

Since the 1950s, Bell Laboratories has concentrated on developing new software techniques and concepts. While at Bell Labs, Donald T. Hawkins examined front-end devices and gateways. He is also responsible for centralized online searching and current awareness groups at Bell Laboratories (Lilley and Trice).

[Sources: Mabon, P. C. (1975). Mission Communications: The Story of Bell Laboratories. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated: Murray Hill, NJ. and Lilley, D. B. and Trice, R. W. (1989). A History of Information Science 1945-1985. San Diego: Academic Press.]