The ghost of Ma Bell returns to life
October 28, 2005
In 1983, courtesy of the Justice Department, big, bad AT&T was dismembered, leaving a remnant and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies.
Twenty-two years later, one of the surviving RBOCs, SBC, has gobbled up Ma and will continue the AT&T name. Judge Harold H. Greene must be rotating in his grave.
WSJ.com - SBC Decides to Stick With AT&T Brand Name
The AT&T brand name will live on.
SBC Communications Inc. announced that it will adopt AT&T Corp.’s moniker once its $16 billion takeover of the company is complete.
The SBC name is little known outside the San Antonio, Texas, company’s 13-state territory, but company executives said AT&T’s notoriety is world-wide.
Reading this brought on a wave of nostalgia, a malady that is becoming chronic with me. I was born during the time that Ma Bell was busy demonstrating a new technology called television, inaugurating transpacific telephone service, and winning Nobel prizes for probing the internal workings of the electron.
While I was in college, Bell Labs invented the transistor. The television age matured, perhaps not a Good Thing. They also invented the concept of cellular telephone in 1947, and you know what that led to.
For all of us in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Ma Bell was the owner of our telephones and the massive switching system behind them. And our (their) telephones always worked.
For you technophobes, the Unix operating system was developed by Bell Labs in 1971. It eventually became the underlying language of the Internet, making it possible for me to write and publish this article.
So, the Ma Bell story isn’t over, and I am feeling older.
Dave, still being amazed at the growth of things technical.
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