I am surprised I would have expected a lab environment to be jeans and lab coats. My first job was at a RND place in 79 so similar time and it was all jeans t shirts labcoats and steel toe caped boots / wellies (for working out in the lab space)
While Bell Labs did do some laboratory science (where they developed the transistor among other things), the majority of researchers there were mathematicians and computer scientists who don't work in a lab.
A laboratory is the place where you work. From the latin 'laborare', roughly translated 'to work'. A CS grad student would work in a lab. As would a carpenter. The difference between an office and a laboratory is usually that there are specialized tools in a laboratory.
not sure what your point is certainly BT's eqvielent at martelsham was now for its style of dress we even had an internal slang term the "martelman" to describe them :-)
I was replying to the person that that was saying that their idea of lab dress was a lab coat and jeans -- a different sort of lab than what most of what Bell Labs was about.
