Bell Labs, the research arm of the Bell System, was for decades one of the most productive industrial research organizations in the world. Its laboratory in Murray Hill, New Jersey, is where much of the early history of modern computing took place.
One landmark from Bell Labs predates the computing work: the transistor. The official Nobel Prize record for the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics shows that the award went jointly to William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” The transistor became the basic building block of all later electronics and computers.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the same laboratory was the birthplace of Unix and the C programming language. In his history of C, Dennis Ritchie identifies himself as a member of Bell Labs in Murray Hill and describes how C and Unix grew up there together on a small DEC PDP-11, with Ken Thompson leading the early Unix work.
The combination of the transistor and the Unix-and-C work gives Bell Labs an outsized place in the history of technology: it produced both the physical device that made modern computing possible and the operating system and language that a large share of modern software is built on.