American Telephone & Telegraph began in 1880 as a project by the American Bell Company to create a viable and cost-effective telephone network for America. Nineteen years later the AT&T project company was so successful that it bought her parent, American Bell. The AT&T company built our country's communication infrastructure. The natural result, well she was a monopoly. But it's not like some evil barons in top hats just started buying up all the pig bellies or sugar or gold one day to corner the market - no, this company invented and created an entire technology. (All Bell-Meucci debates aside...)
Well this monopoly (for the most part) provided affordable, quality service for nearly a century, until the government decided that "Ma Bell" was getting too big for her britches. After WWII, the country experienced an enormous surge in technological development by numerous companies (i.e. would-be phone company competitors), but because of the natural monopoly, many new technologies would stagger in dormancy (fiber-optics, microwave communications equipment, etc.). In 1974, in a move that I'm sure was in no way encouraged by money from Microwave Communications, Inc., the Justice Department brought an anti-trust suit against AT&T.
A sign that hung in many Bell facilities in 1983 read:
"There are two giant entities at work in our country, and they both have an amazing influence on our daily lives. . . one has given us radar, sonar, stereo, teletype, the transistor, hearing aids, artificial larynxes, talking movies, and the telephone. The other has given us the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, the Great Depression, the gasoline crisis, and the Watergate fiasco. Guess which one is now trying to tell the other one how to run its business?"(*Actually, to be fair, I should point out that the Krauts and the Commies did play a part in some of those items.)
I really hate to defend the phone company, but I think the sign had a point. Well, some judges and executives got paid off, and as a result of the suit, in 1984, AT&T agreed to divest many of her subsidiaries (the "Baby Bells"), in return for being allowed to venture in to the computer business (which was a HUGE flop, by the way). So now customers had to go to different companies for long distance and local service, and there was a whole host of corporate break-ups, spin-offs, and restructurings. Bell Labs/Lucent, Oracle, Western Electric - not to mention all the regional local companies (there were many which later consolidated on there own - for instance, BellSouth used to be at least 3 different companies).The idea was to give folks a choice. Sounds good, right? New companies like MCI & Sprint could now operate (thanks to a court order) on the physical infrastructure that another company built. Sounds fair to me. Well if it'll bring LD prices down, I guess it's ok (I didn't pay a phone bill back then, but folks say prices didn't go down like we were promised. LD sort of went down, but local went up, up and up some more. Mmm...)
However, another result of the suit allowed the subsidiary companies to remain as monopolies of local service! What a crock. So all the many "Regional Bell Operating Companies," South Central Bell (later BellSouth), Southwestern Bell (SBC), Bell Atlantic (GTE, later Verizon) - they still had customers by the, um, well, by the bills.
Then cellular service came along, and BellSouth offered BellSouth Mobility (later Cingular), as I'm sure all the other Baby Bells offered their own versions. AT&T also had AT&T Wireless.
I'm getting to my point - and kudos if you can keep all this straight - AT&T begats Baby Bells, like BellSouth and Southwestern (SBC). Baby Bells begat cell companies, like Cingular. What happens 20 years later, the Baby Bells come back. AT&T starts buying up Lucent, Oracle, Western Electric, Cingular buys AT&T Wireless, SBC buys AT&T (keeping the AT&T name), AT&T buys Cingular, and now AT&T buys BellSouth.
God creates man, man destroys God, man creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man, woman inherits the earth.
