Lots of old memories in this production. I remember 1983 being "Functional Divestiture" and worked on projects that determined who (RBOC or AT&T) had ownership of different circuits. I was divested to ATTCOM, transferred to ATTIS, then quit and got rehired by the RBOC. At the end of my career in 2010 I ended up retired from AT&T. What a long, strange trip it's been.
I was -2yrs old when this happened lol but I love that you uploaded this. This is the kinda stuff I love about TH-cam. I downloaded this so that it could never be lost.
I started working for Pacific Bell in 1971. I was a cable splicer and worked in manholes, on poles, in central offices and residential and commercial installations. They paid me to leave (V.I.P.P.) in 1985 and I worked for many private business' doing installation and repair. In 1990 I got a call from a contractor to do work for the phone company where I had left 5 years before. I made 2 1/2 times as much as the employees doing the same thing I was. In 2000 that came to an end so I got a contractors license and started my own business. I am still now doing phone and data work and I get a small pension from AT&T. I was lucky as I learned a great skill and left early enough that I still love doing the work privately. Many of the guys I worked with in the phone company were disgruntled and couldn't wait to retire.
Should still be proud to say you worked for them, they managed to fk everyone everywhere for decades, then the government let them split into 7 geographic regions so they could still be monopolies and more thoroughly fk everyone in their respective regions. I'm a Verizon vet, convinced more than one, but less than three people to get 'vz fo life' tattoos. I was a go-getter...not only fk'd our customers, but also, managed to fk my co-workers. My generation (early 2000's) learned from the 60's and 70's mostly, and still used a lot of their software.
@@jamesbael6255I was proud to work there because employees took pride in their work. I remember one co-worker that would polish the brass railing outside the steps to the central office. When the telephone installer came to your house he fixed the inside wire and also repaired your telephone set if needed.
I hired on in 72 & road the Bell wave till 2012. Saw alot of changes in 40 years. Made the right choice in 83 to go with my region parent company SBC. Only had 11 years service but saw the writing on the wall. Senority was the key. You aint got any, say by. I went inside for 9 years, then outside for the rest. Wow...what a ride. Loved it. They finally got rid of us old guys with a plan cald VSP. Half years pay & full retirement to walk away. Fiber optics got most of the years that cable pairs were king. Now its all about band width, speed, video, cell towers, 5g, I got to work on it all....😪
We had excellent training, but after the breakup the company closed it's schools. I remember as a repair tech the company would buy the best tools for us, but later on we got cheaper tools. I wish I still had my old meter, it was very good quality, the newer ones were pretty much junk.
Had the same experience at OBT. Back in the day, management came up through the ranks and knew the job. After divestiture management knew nothing about the job or technology. Our CO boss only sent one person in the group for training. The rest of us were supposed to go to the subject matter expert with questions. Saved the company money and got the foreman a bigger bonus.
Ironically Google is now larger, more powerful and more unregulated than ATT ever was and has more control over our lives, privacy, information and data. As much as I despise govt intervention in private business Google needs to be broken up and tightly regulated.
What a monumental failure buying DirecTV was for At&t. Hope you weren't involved in that mess. So dumb to spend 60 Billion on a company that was and still is obsolete. Still employed with them?
I started working for Western Electric on February 6th 1963, at Rockaway Avenue Brooklyn New York after that the World's Fair working on another 5 crossbar 1963 - 1964
My father, worked for S.W. Bell for 26 years as a civil engineer.and his last official day was the day before the breakup of AT&T. He said he never regretted it and enjoyed his early retirement. He said he tossed his slide rule in the trash on the way out the door.
1:10 "It's a way of life that's literally changing." And since then, the daily newspaper, personal mail, broadcast TV, bookstores, and fulltime English lit professors have gone as well. The phone company was just the start.
Great documentary! I got into the business back in 1981. I was 18 years old at the time. I’m 57 years old now and I’m lucky enough to still be working in the business. I work on both TDM and VOIP phones, these days.
Waterlec Ma Bell got greedy. They wouldn’t even allow people to buy 3rd part accessories for bell system phones. Their greed turned them into an illegal monopoly. It was a wonderful organization, but they killed themselves. The government only enforced the laws. Having said that, I admire the innovation they had.
@gblueslover2 what if I told you that what you thought you know is a lie? The economy of the United States was built on bourbon, sexworkers, and illegal imports from South/central/lower north america...including the stupid Monopoly that divested itself into 7 independent monopolies.
Now I see why Amazon and the Sprint and T-Moble merger is such a threat. It's amazing how reviewing the past can tell us a lot about the present and future.
The difference is that the Bell system was a legally enforced monopoly, ie competition was PROHIBITED. Amazon is big because of market forces. People do business with Amazon because they want to, not because they have to.
I banked a lot of money because of this break up. I went to a local college and took a technical course in telecommunications and started my own business as a 20 yo installing Siemens PBX phone systems with Kmart along the Mississippi gulf coast. I had 2 other employees from my graduating class.
I was leasing a home phone from AT&T in 1981 for which they charged $3.00 per month. I finally woke up to the fact that I could purchase my own phone, which I did for $13 at a Woolworth. It lasted 13 years, saving me more than $450. That was the magnitude of the scam AT&T was working on its residential customers.
@@TheWizardGamez Oh, that was WAY in the Long-Ago Time, maybe 79-80ish, give or take. The modem was for a computer my dad had "borrowed" from his work, that had the coupler modem included.
@benbohannon Nothing stopping you from buying your own. I've been thinking about buying a new gigabit router for my FIOS line, just been too lazy so far 🤔
I worked for Western Electric . Bell Labs was the biggest looser. pure research stopped in 1996. can you imagine bell labs let loose on batteries and solar power.
This is why it's in a company's best interest to have a competitor to maintain a duopoly, just as Microsoft did in the late 90s helping Apple out during their crisis
I remember this. Very confusing at the time (I was a child; 12 then) , kinda still is... My grandmother retired from AT&T Indiana Bell in 1973, as a operator. Grew up with ma Bell in the house. Remember the princess phone (?) with the light up dial? Grandma believed in, and had dial; my house had push buttons (my whole life; till recently).
The technology and the business drifted more than anyone could imagine in 1984. Telephones (smartphones) are mostly not even used to talk on. Email, Facebook, chat, web, apps, web, and so on occupy everyone's time. As for maintaining the switching equipment, that's changed. It's huge server farms now. I bet you can't remember the last time you called a telephone or directory assistance operator. I mean, who in their right mind is going to make a person-to-person call to a cellphone? If the operators didn't find different jobs, they got laid off.
As a 31 year old, it's kind of crazy/interesting to hear their thought processes. It's like could y'all not see that it was a clear monopoly?! But then again I get it...100 year old machine, it was considered a utility not a product or service. People weren't used to mass layoffs in those days, I know it was truly devastating for those who lost their jobs.
They tried, they split off the Internet into two copies, and gave everything to the government to do with as they please regardless of freedom. They should rot in hell.
If the Bell System was a complete monopoly, it would have served all of the phones in the country. That was not the case. There were also phone companies and systems not under Bell or AT&T ownership. There was General Telephone, United Telephone, and Continental. Parts of Los Angeles was served by a General System operating company, as was Tampa and St. Petersburg in Florida. General purchased the Hawaiian Telephone Company, which became GT&E operating company. Service in Alaska is also in the General System. United operating companies cover many localities in mid and southwest Florida, including Naples and Sebring. United also has a large section of mid to southern Pennsylvania.
Now that 40 years have passed since the break up of Ma Bell, there's absolutely no doubt that the stunning technological developments we all live with today could never have developed if the old Bell System had continued in its previous format!
Yet, Cincinnati Bell is still Cincinnati Bell. Oddly a lot of the land lines in western Ohio were not owned by AT&T, but United Telephone of Ohio. United Telephone eventually changed their name Sprint. Then in the mid-2000s Sprint merged with Nextel and sold their phone lines to Embarq. As Justin Hill stated earlier Embarq later merged with CenturyTel to become CenturLink. Most of the telephone poles I have seen in that region still have United Telephone and/or Sprint signs on them.
Albert Carello VZ kept VA, MD, NJ and NY. Those are the money states. The other states from the GTE merger that became VZ did eventually get sold off to Frontier.
Amazing how wrong Charlie Brown was about the effects of his own decision. Still, had it not been for all of the new technology that was ready to hit the industry, it could well have turned out differently. I always felt that monopolies in things like telephone service actually made sense. After all, you don't want five different companies running lines through the local area all to provide the same service. I have nostalgic feelings about the old AT&T system. The business has changed so much since then. Recently, I wanted to get at POTS line installed at my house. It had been years since we had one, but I wanted to get the VOIP line off of our Internet connection to preserve capacity for other applications. (Last time we had a POTS line, it was with BellSouth. It now appears that BellSouth doesn't even do that anymore.) The hardest thing about getting a POTS line these days is convincing the AT&T sales people that you don't want VOIP, you don't want AT&T Internet, and you don't want DirectTV. Once we got past all those sales pitches, they came out and installed the line with no problems. The other day, on a lark, we connected an old rotary phone to the line and tried to make a call ... worked like a charm.
Wen0101 Ahhh POTS yes I've heard people mention that a few times, luckily for me, my home was the house I grew up in and currently live in has the same number since I can remember and I was born in 77, and the only rotary dial phone in the house is the one in the kitchen, wall mounted Western Electric, light up dial, and when that thing rings you can hear it through the whole house. And not to mention POTS or as its called Plain Ordinary Telephone Service, is more reliable than the VoIP shit that is out there today.
@@jamesbulldogmiller As a result of AT&T buying SBC and BellSouth, those two large regional Bell operating companies were wiped off the map in favor of a larger region for AT&T, comprising of the Midwest to the Southern and Soutwestern United States, but still, AT&T does not have the reach that it once did, thanks to the likes of Verizon and Lumen Technologies, both of which merged with their fair share of RBOCs and non-RBOCs through the years...
I was all of 13 on January 4,1984. I didn't know or care much about this at the time, but man . Watching this and looking back at it, hind sight is 2020 as they say. This absolutely had to suck for all involved.
Breaking up AT&T, in my opinion, was the worst thing that happened in the United States. It was the start of destroying the United States. Today is August 26th 2022
Don't forget, this country was built on competition - If not for the breakup The Internet as we all know it would not exist, prices for landline phone services would have just kept going up and up, cell phones would have costed 100x what they do today, smartphones most likely never would have caught on, and the simplest things, such as text messages, never would have come along
That is sad, my Western Electric 2500D, manufactured in 1975, still operates wonderfully, and is the only phone that I can truly understand people as if they were in the same room as me. I bought it at a thrift store many years ago, all I did was clean it, and rewire the phone cord as it was made to hard wire into wall outlet. Truly made to last.
I know who Western Electric is, our landline phone in the kitchen to this day is wall mounted Western Electric Rotary Dial phone, that has outlasted ALL the phones we've went through in all these years. Thank you Western Electric.
My mom, three aunts and a step dad all worked at the western electric Columbus works. My step dad stayed and worked for Ameritech after the change over
On the bottom of the rotary phone sitting on a small mahogany table in the hall in my house it says .... "Property of Northwestern Bell Telephone Co." I've had the same phone and number since January, 1950.
@Richard Conte that is absolutely incorrect. Rotary phones can still be used today and still are. Most telecom companies still accept rotary dialing. If you are on VOIP, fiber, all you need is a pulse to tone converter like dialgizmo, this allows you to use your rotary on non pulse lines. You can even use these phones on a Bluetooth gateway with your cell phone if you don’t have a landline.
And those old phones were tanks. When i was a young boy in the mid 1990s, my mother had a rotary dial phone in the duplex she was living in at the time, my most fond memories are watching Mom slam the phone down on telemarketers. Now i get more telemarketer calls than ever, and just one slam and kiss my Samsung Galaxy Note goodbye. Errrrrr😡
We should have never broke up Ma Bell. Bell Labs and Western Electric were the best in the world. After the break up we lost a lot of jobs, these were good jobs, engineers, designers, techs, all the way to general labor. These companies gave a lot of American workers a lifetime of good employment. After the breakup Western Electric closed down, production was sent overseas, jobs went away.
You, like many other people, make the mistake of thinking that companies exist primarily to provide jobs. They do not. They exist to satisfy human wants. We used to employ a LOT more people to feed ourselves, but the result of the advances that caused the "loss" of all those farm jobs is that farms are far, FAR more productive than they were, and we are incomparably better off for it. THAT is the true measure of WEALTH, instead of thinking in terms of "protecting jobs". Telephone service is far, FAR better than it was when ONE phone company was the only one allowed to exist.
After the breakup, New Jersey Bell under Bell Atlantic Corporation no longer service telephone equipment, does not handle long distance and are not part of AT&T.
It was a break-up that was a huge mess and unnecessary. AT&T was not in a "competitive" commercialization type of business model back then and treated that switch network like gold and took well care of it. They done more for society then any company has in history so far. If it wasn't for them we won't have the technological advances we have today and they did treat the people that works for them like family and paid well, so they took pride in their work as a result and it showed, hence the advancements that came from it. When you create uncertainty people are going to be stressed out and not preform and no longer care, or take pride in their work. When you put new companies in the mix, it about profit for that smaller company and not advancement. Then projects as well are likely going to go to the lowest bidder, not about quality anymore. That the thing Bell was large enough they could focus more on advancement. That judge did literally broke up the best system during that time and set a bad example. If you broke up companies like Amazon then all for it as they put a lot of others out of business, by taking a loss for many years and etc and treat people as disposable.
@@puntme "Natural monopoly" is a myth, promulgated to defend monopoly practices by entrenched business interests. mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly
Phone service is much cheaper than it was under the monopolistic Bell system, particularly long distance. This is a good thing. And technological advancement hardly ceased after the breakup. The opposite is the case.
In the restaurant, they blamed the wrong people. The AT&T CEO should have shared the market. If they had shared with MCI, the company would still be intact. Take heed AMAZON, FACEBOOK, GOOGLE
36 years later and now AT&T owns WarnerMedia, the company that owns Warner Bros., the studios that created Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes...
But they don't *make* anything. That's the difference. It's just a name now. Bell made everything they used, right here in the us. And now... the keyboard you typed this on.. china, right? Yeah.
@@wakkowarner4288 WarnerMedia has been sold to Discovery Communications by AT&T, only to be renamed Warner Bros. Discovery after the fact. In the next decade, more and more of what's currently made in China will be instead made in Mexico, due to the tariff that was currently placed on China during the Trump administration that the Biden administration refuses to lift...
As of 2022, AT&T divested themselves of Warner Media, only for Discovery Communications to merge with them and create a debacle that ends up with the loss of some modern Cartoon Network shows, including Infinity Train...Someday, Warner and Discovery will learn from this grave mistake and preserve more of its modern programming...
In 1984 it was impossible to see, but from 2018 it is now very easy to see that breaking up the monopoly was the right thing to do... A monopolistic AT&T certainly had some advantages -- in particular, the fact that they got 100% of their equipment from Western Electric meant that they could absolutely control Western Electric's production, and direct it towards, say, solving particular problems like damaged equipment from a natural disaster, thus recovering from said natural disaster more quickly than multiple, separate companies ever could. But we traded that off for *far* cheaper long-distance costs and *far* more diverse telephone equipment with *far* greater capabilities than anyone could ever imagine in 1984. I think, long term, we clearly benefitted.
I have a brand new in the boxes Pink Trimline with the adapters for modular cords. Pink was Discontinued in 1969. I checked them and they still work. I also have some of the old rubber butt sets and colored cords from the phones to the wall. Will sell to anyone interested. NYHuguenot@aol.com
I have to disagree with you. The Consent Decree of 1982 legitimized the commercialization of the telecom business so the executives could make off and allegedly "innovate". At this time, this "monopoly" was still in the customers interest because AT&T was not in a "competitive" (err. commercialization) type of business model. People moan and bitch about voice quality today, well that's the tradeoff. You want cheaper service, you have to cut corners. And then we have people that want to regulate the same technology that rebelled against telephony. And AT&T never had any financial illergularities or filed for bankruptcy like Nortel, MCI Worldcom, and bunch of other companies that couldn't compete post Divestiture.
@@Steveos312 "The Consent Decree of 1982 legitimized the commercialization of the telecom business so the executives could make off and allegedly "innovate". " You put innovate in quotes, implying that there's been none since 1982. That is completely false.
Look where we are today, the CO is pretty much gone or on the way out, tie down and copper are fading fast and VOIP is king. This would have happened one way or another, along with multiple carriers and multiple suppliers. Now you can't even buy a smart phone made by an American owned company let alone built in the US and 5G switching comes from China. The question is, was it easier via the breakup method or would it have been more painful without the breakup over the long run as eventually we would one way or another land in a free market no monopoly environment. I remember playing hot potato between Bell South and AT&T over whose problem it really was, T1 failure, each claiming the problem was the others (equip verses line.) Now I would do business with neither, cable company or wireless today.
I remember vacationing in Minnesota in 2003. I saw that the phone book for Qwest, the phone company in the Twin Cities, was so big, that they split it into two separate books, a yellow pages phone book and a white pages phone book...
I started out as a janitor with PNB in 1968 and held a lot of different jobs both as non management and management. I worked for the non reg side of USWEST then retired in 96. The break up was hard on most of us.
After the breakup of the Bell System management discovered that training technicians cost money and that someone in an overseas call center with a flip chart could provide customer service even if they spoke English, but didn’t understand it.
POLITICS nothing more, so many good friends and people that have lost so much, the best job I ever had, and the new company kicked the old guys case aside
All I know is my phone bill prior to the breakup was $12 a month. Then after it went to $45 a month. So we the consumer were the "beneficiary' of the breakup my ass.And the biggest bone of contention was the cost of a long distance call.
Looks like they got broken up for being too honest a company, and sharing technology that others can make a profit on. "How could this company be so big and not rip off the people?, Well time to break them up!"
@@robertromero8692 you have no idea what you’re talking about. ATT pioneered many systems we take for granted today. If they were the same company today, we would have fiber DSL service everywhere, why because they were forced to innovate and invest.
@@Lzrdman91 No idea about what? That AT&T was a monopoly? Of course they were. There's no dispute about that. And of course they charged accordingly. There's been much more innovation since they were broken up, and long distance has gotten MUCH cheaper. That's a fact, in contrast to your speculation.
Great video! As someone born in the cellular era, the benefits of the divestiture are obvious today. It's so funny how Charles Brown said that he "doesn't buy into the technological horn of plenty" when that's exactly what happened. In the short term, the split-up might've been a pain but in the long, it was one of the best things to ever happen to the US and arguably the world.
***** Well said, I could not have explained it as good as you, I'm a former tech of AT&T, I started in 1973 working under the old Bell System. One of things we really disliked is the company started hiring outside contractors to do splicing and other work, and I don't think the quality of their work was up to par. AT&T techs took pride in their work and followed the BSP. (Bell System Practice).
Honestly I lived in a rural area in the mid 1990s and we still had a party line up until then. I wonder if the break up would have never happened would we have had private line sooner? How would cell phones happened under straight At&t? I think it was a very bad thing in many ways. Phone service has suffered as a result. However it has had many advantages. Your able to buy your own phone and even have multiple manufacturers too.
We were developing cellular telephony at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois, around the time of Divestiture. The name of the project was the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). My group developed the Autoplex 1000 cellular switch, which consisted of a Dimension PBX, a token-passing ring developed by Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio, and a 3B20D computer to run the whole thing. The ring tied the Dimension PBX and all the cell sites together. The cells communicated with the ring via X.25. We had a luggable cell phone (a Motorola mobile phone built into a small suitcase) that circulated around the department, so we each got to have a cell phone in our car for a week at a time. It was a fun project.
" As someone born in the cellular era, the benefits of the divestiture are obvious today." "Words of wisdom" from an entitled Millennial who's never even made a real phone call. "It's so funny how Charles Brown said that he "doesn't buy into the technological horn of plenty" when that's exactly what happened." No, that's not what happened at all, much less "exactly". Technology would have progressed either way. By the way, the Bell System invented the transistor, which is the fundamental device that makes all modern electronics technology possible. Also, cell phones are not even remotely high-tech, at least not with regard to how they make phone calls. They are simply a portable radio transceiver. "In the short term, the split-up might've been a pain but in the long, it was one of the best things to ever happen to the US and arguably the world." No, it is a major black mark on the U.S. government. It is logically invalid and morally wrong to steal, regardless of the reasoning behind it. No one logically has a right to possess / take away or use someone else's stuff. Companies like MCI and Sprint wanted to compete, so instead of building their own infrastructure like the Bell System did, costing them an untold fortune in time and money, they can just whine to Big Brother and get to skip that part and steal usage of someone else's property? That's just one of the many acts of thuggery that took place, and the idea that it's a good thing because you like your glorified walkie-talkie, is asinine. The U.S. had the best phone system in the world, by far, and today it is a convoluted, fractured, unreliable pile of shit complete with a bunch of made-in-China garbage connected to it (rather than ultra high quality Western Electric products). No one ever said on a Bell System call, "Can you hear me now?"
I remember growing up as a kid I saw an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark on Nick at Night about the phone company controlling everything and was scared of the phone company when they would come drop off new phone books lol.
what stood out for me, 1972-2015, MA BELL was trying to put smaller telcos out of business. MA BELL did this by changing their T1 format. smaller telcos couldn't afford to keep buying new equipment every time MA BELL changed the 24 channel sampling sequence. if you wanted to "talk" to MA BELL you had to buy their equipment. it was a great journey though.. amazing.
Looking at telephony today... Not even sure I could find and point at what was. POTS is almost no more. Everything is IP, nearly gone are circuit the switches.
The breakup of AT&T made them the smallest regional Bell operating company, but they were restricted to the long distance and technological sides of the business and were not allowed to use the "bell" logo that was synonymous with the pre-breakup AT&T Bell System and the post-breakup regional Bell operating companies...
I ended up with Pacific Bell and on the first day of the split we had to park vehicles in front of the shop doors because the Techs that went to AT&T were sneaking in at night and stealing the tools and test gear.
Nowadays, you call 411 information, the operator on the other line, is on the other side of the world, an accent that you cannot even understand what you’re talking about, that’s with the break up dead, ship jobs eventually to other countries, so like I always say follow the money, do you know who benefited from all this break up., The little guy working paycheck to paycheck, operators, they’re the ones that got shafted. Everybody else benefit from it.
@@pjimmbojimmbo1990 exactly what they’re trying to do nowadays with these big tech companies, break them up like they did with the phone company some years ago.
Just think about it for a moment AT&T was so massive back then with a snap of fingers they could have sent us back decades, and we would not have smartphones right now.
I own my own interconnect company and I worked in the interconnect and non Bell side of the businesss since the late seventies and I have to say that I think the predictions of improvements in technology have played out well competition Spurs growth and innovation.
So the current AT&T is not the same as the AT&T of the 70s/80s, is that correct? The current company is actually one of the ‘baby bells’ that now brands itself AT&T? Confusing
It was better they were broke up. It was a huge PITA just to get a second phone line installed in the same house before Bell was broken up. That, and they wouldn't allow you to use any phone except the craptastic stuff they produced. Features we take for granted like call forwarding, etc, etc were nonexistent. Last but not least, dialing outside your area code was insanely expensive.
Brown got it wrong when he said that he believed that the monopoly wasn't stifling innovation, and that Bell Labs could turn out everything their customers needed and wanted. And yes, the monopoly was stifling innovation because it actively resisted providing easy access to the physical network to its competitors. That resistance may have been well intentioned in the name of technological purity, but what he (and the monopoly) wasn't concerned with was the cost to consumers that the push for purity was exacting. Sure, customer service was second to none. Product quality was second to none. And the price that consumers paid out of pocket for all of that? Second to none. Consumers deserve low cost choices. As for the telephone repair facilities? A complete waste of resources. It would have cost less money to simply trash a broken phone and send out a new one than to have these facilities with high paid low skilled technicians repairing them. And if they were such high quality devices, why were they even breaking to begin with? I guess that when you're a monopoly that will only lease equipment to customers at yearly lease rates that equal more than the cost to make them, you can write your own checks. And the meathead phone repair plant workers complaining about losing their jobs? A lot of them were probably otherwise unemployable, and were being paid 3-4 times what they were worth to just skate along and turn a screwdriver all at the expense of the hapless consumer. There's a reason that those repair plant workers weren't offered a path into the new companies. Because they weren't capable of learning the skill set needed.
This is just an instance of the government at it's mindless best. As a consumer before and after, before was definitely better. The only good thing was forcing the Telco's to allow third party equipment to be hooked up.
Isn't AT&T one of the biggest media companies around overshadowing almost any other corporation they were split apart once they grew back even bigger than before
Monopoly or not, it was a great, competent company. I can’t say the same about the state monopoly that operated my country’s phone network until the 90s.
it was a big deal to work at western electric. i moved to new york tel in 1982 before the break up. i was in the dec. i was able to retire in 1996 after 29 years of service under a 6+6 early retirement. retired with a good pension and health care at 49 y.o. 21 years now and not dead. i get them good and even for retiring me. collected almost $1,000,000 in pension and benefits. Freedom to do something else like own a farm.
Lots of old memories in this production. I remember 1983 being "Functional Divestiture" and worked on projects that determined who (RBOC or AT&T) had ownership of different circuits. I was divested to ATTCOM, transferred to ATTIS, then quit and got rehired by the RBOC. At the end of my career in 2010 I ended up retired from AT&T. What a long, strange trip it's been.
I was -2yrs old when this happened lol but I love that you uploaded this. This is the kinda stuff I love about TH-cam. I downloaded this so that it could never be lost.
I was just Born
I started working for Pacific Bell in 1971. I was a cable splicer and worked in manholes, on poles, in central offices and residential and commercial installations. They paid me to leave (V.I.P.P.) in 1985 and I worked for many private business' doing installation and repair. In 1990 I got a call from a contractor to do work for the phone company where I had left 5 years before. I made 2 1/2 times as much as the employees doing the same thing I was. In 2000 that came to an end so I got a contractors license and started my own business. I am still now doing phone and data work and I get a small pension from AT&T. I was lucky as I learned a great skill and left early enough that I still love doing the work privately. Many of the guys I worked with in the phone company were disgruntled and couldn't wait to retire.
I worked for MaBell, in the old days I was proud to tell people I work for MaBell.
She had the ill communication, for sure.
Should still be proud to say you worked for them, they managed to fk everyone everywhere for decades, then the government let them split into 7 geographic regions so they could still be monopolies and more thoroughly fk everyone in their respective regions.
I'm a Verizon vet, convinced more than one, but less than three people to get 'vz fo life' tattoos.
I was a go-getter...not only fk'd our customers, but also, managed to fk my co-workers.
My generation (early 2000's) learned from the 60's and 70's mostly, and still used a lot of their software.
@@jamesbael6255I was proud to work there because employees took pride in their work. I remember one co-worker that would polish the brass railing outside the steps to the central office. When the telephone installer came to your house he fixed the inside wire and also repaired your telephone set if needed.
I hired on in 72 & road the Bell wave till 2012. Saw alot of changes in 40 years. Made the right choice in 83 to go with my region parent company SBC. Only had 11 years service but saw the writing on the wall. Senority was the key. You aint got any, say by. I went inside for 9 years, then outside for the rest. Wow...what a ride. Loved it. They finally got rid of us old guys with a plan cald VSP. Half years pay & full retirement to walk away. Fiber optics got most of the years that cable pairs were king. Now its all about band width, speed, video, cell towers, 5g, I got to work on it all....😪
i salute you (lol)
I still see old SBC equipment in my neighborhood in San Diego.
We had excellent training, but after the breakup the company closed it's schools. I remember as a repair tech the company would buy the best tools for us, but later on we got cheaper tools. I wish I still had my old meter, it was very good quality, the newer ones were pretty much junk.
Had the same experience at OBT. Back in the day, management came up through the ranks and knew the job. After divestiture management knew nothing about the job or technology. Our CO boss only sent one person in the group for training. The rest of us were supposed to go to the subject matter expert with questions. Saved the company money and got the foreman a bigger bonus.
That tells you that the old bell system and western electric equipment lasted longer then modern stuff we have today!
I'd also suspect (too young to remember) that customer service was vastly superior to today's dogshit cellphone companies
Every American and Canadian should watch this video.
Ironically Google is now larger, more powerful and more unregulated than ATT ever was and has more control over our lives, privacy, information and data. As much as I despise govt intervention in private business Google needs to be broken up and tightly regulated.
Lolbertarian
WRONG!
What a ridiculous idea. You want POLITICIANS to have control over a search engine, TH-cam, and the sale of smartphones??
Good point
Started with NJ Bell and still working for AT&T 37 years later. What a change
What a monumental failure buying DirecTV was for At&t. Hope you weren't involved in that mess. So dumb to spend 60 Billion on a company that was and still is obsolete. Still employed with them?
@All About Roofing Nope. Had nothing to do with that
I started working for Western Electric on February 6th 1963, at Rockaway Avenue Brooklyn New York after that the World's Fair working on another 5 crossbar 1963 - 1964
My father, worked for S.W. Bell for 26 years as a civil engineer.and his last official day was the day before the breakup of AT&T. He said he never regretted it and enjoyed his early retirement. He said he tossed his slide rule in the trash on the way out the door.
1:10 "It's a way of life that's literally changing." And since then, the daily newspaper, personal mail, broadcast TV, bookstores, and fulltime English lit professors have gone as well. The phone company was just the start.
The greatest loss of the breakup was the loss of Bell Labs. A pure research organization that no longer exists!
No it still exists and is still a pioneer . It became Lucent technologies , then merged Alcatel - Lucent Bell labs and as of 2016 Nokia Bell Labs.
Alcatrash
Great documentary!
I got into the business back in 1981. I was 18 years old at the time. I’m 57 years old now and I’m lucky enough to still be working in the business. I work on both TDM and VOIP phones, these days.
Definitely I remember alot of this stuff I was born in 84 but remember alot
In the old Bell System managers came up through the ranks, like Brown.
Why was everybody picking on Charlie Brown?
@@ScDMiller1 like when they said in they interviewed the blue collar repair workers "if you're #1, you're a target".
Waterlec Ma Bell got greedy. They wouldn’t even allow people to buy 3rd part accessories for bell system phones. Their greed turned them into an illegal monopoly. It was a wonderful organization, but they killed themselves. The government only enforced the laws. Having said that, I admire the innovation they had.
gblueslover2 I believe that you believe that.
@gblueslover2 what if I told you that what you thought you know is a lie?
The economy of the United States was built on bourbon, sexworkers, and illegal imports from South/central/lower north america...including the stupid Monopoly that divested itself into 7 independent monopolies.
Now I see why Amazon and the Sprint and T-Moble merger is such a threat. It's amazing how reviewing the past can tell us a lot about the present and future.
The difference is that the Bell system was a legally enforced monopoly, ie competition was PROHIBITED. Amazon is big because of market forces. People do business with Amazon because they want to, not because they have to.
@@RobertR3750 I agree
Sprint and T-Mobiles network doesn’t work well so I don’t see it as a huge monopoly
I banked a lot of money because of this break up. I went to a local college and took a technical course in telecommunications and started my own business as a 20 yo installing Siemens PBX phone systems with Kmart along the Mississippi gulf coast. I had 2 other employees from my graduating class.
I was leasing a home phone from AT&T in 1981 for which they charged $3.00 per month. I finally woke up to the fact that I could purchase my own phone, which I did for $13 at a Woolworth. It lasted 13 years, saving me more than $450. That was the magnitude of the scam AT&T was working on its residential customers.
They tried to charge us $40/month to connect a computer modem to our home line, even though it was an early 1st generation acoustic coupler type.
@@looneyburgmusicyear?
@@TheWizardGamez Oh, that was WAY in the Long-Ago Time, maybe 79-80ish, give or take. The modem was for a computer my dad had "borrowed" from his work, that had the coupler modem included.
And AT&T still charges $10/mo for our internet gateway/router. Some things never change.
@benbohannon Nothing stopping you from buying your own.
I've been thinking about buying a new gigabit router for my FIOS line, just been too lazy so far 🤔
I worked for Western Electric . Bell Labs was the biggest looser.
pure research stopped in 1996. can you imagine bell labs let loose
on batteries and solar power.
This is why it's in a company's best interest to have a competitor to maintain a duopoly, just as Microsoft did in the late 90s helping Apple out during their crisis
That’s factually wrong - Apple didn’t need Microsoft in 1997. Microsoft needed Apple to help it get out of the anti-trust litigation.
I remember this. Very confusing at the time (I was a child; 12 then) , kinda still is...
My grandmother retired from AT&T Indiana Bell in 1973, as a operator. Grew up with ma Bell in the house. Remember the princess phone (?) with the light up dial? Grandma believed in, and had dial; my house had push buttons (my whole life; till recently).
Might add I was sometimes annoyed by telemarketers trying to sell me long distance service in my 20s (1990s)..
The technology and the business drifted more than anyone could imagine in 1984. Telephones (smartphones) are mostly not even used to talk on. Email, Facebook, chat, web, apps, web, and so on occupy everyone's time. As for maintaining the switching equipment, that's changed. It's huge server farms now. I bet you can't remember the last time you called a telephone or directory assistance operator. I mean, who in their right mind is going to make a person-to-person call to a cellphone? If the operators didn't find different jobs, they got laid off.
My grandmother worked for MaBell way back in the day as an operator. She worked for them for 35 years!
As a 31 year old, it's kind of crazy/interesting to hear their thought processes. It's like could y'all not see that it was a clear monopoly?! But then again I get it...100 year old machine, it was considered a utility not a product or service. People weren't used to mass layoffs in those days, I know it was truly devastating for those who lost their jobs.
the term was "natural monopoly," but it makes more sense for such a thing to be run by a government so it's focused entirely on quality of service.
@@atomicthumbsV2 The whole concept of a "natural monopoly" is a crock.
@@robertromero8692 have fun with your competing fire departments cost-cutting lol
@@atomicthumbsV2 Sounds like you don't believe in competition. You must have loved the Soviet economy.
It was devistating only for a while, and was a change for the better, I got a job in Hawaii working for GTE Hawaiian tel and was the best move ever.
Long live packet switched networks. Although AT&T couldn't control the internet it was the future.
They tried, they split off the Internet into two copies, and gave everything to the government to do with as they please regardless of freedom. They should rot in hell.
Far, far, far more interesting would be THE DAY BEFORE, specifically who was selling-short shares in the company.
If the Bell System was a complete monopoly, it would have served all of the phones in the country. That was not the case. There were also phone companies and systems not under Bell or AT&T ownership. There was General Telephone, United Telephone, and Continental. Parts of Los Angeles was served by a General System operating company, as was Tampa and St. Petersburg in Florida. General purchased the Hawaiian Telephone Company, which became GT&E operating company. Service in Alaska is also in the General System. United operating companies cover many localities in mid and southwest Florida, including Naples and Sebring. United also has a large section of mid to southern Pennsylvania.
Now that 40 years have passed since the break up of Ma Bell, there's absolutely no doubt that the stunning technological developments we all live with today could never have developed if the old Bell System had continued in its previous format!
I keep thinking of Lilly Tomlin snorting and saying "Because we're the phone company".
I was young but we watched Lily every week.
It really WAS a beginning of something big because the beginning of Bell Atlantic in January 1984 was the beginning of Verizon.
Bell Atlantic merged with NYNEX and GTE to form Verizon.
Prior to merging with AT&T, Bellsouth and acquiring DirecTV, SBC merged with Pacific Bell.
CenturyTel merged with Embarq to form CenturyLink.
Yet, Cincinnati Bell is still Cincinnati Bell.
Oddly a lot of the land lines in western Ohio were not owned by AT&T, but United Telephone of Ohio. United Telephone eventually changed their name Sprint. Then in the mid-2000s Sprint merged with Nextel and sold their phone lines to Embarq. As Justin Hill stated earlier Embarq later merged with CenturyTel to become CenturLink. Most of the telephone poles I have seen in that region still have United Telephone and/or Sprint signs on them.
Albert Carello not in VA, MD.... Local telco is still Verizon.
Albert Carello VZ kept VA, MD, NJ and NY. Those are the money states. The other states from the GTE merger that became VZ did eventually get sold off to Frontier.
Amazing how wrong Charlie Brown was about the effects of his own decision. Still, had it not been for all of the new technology that was ready to hit the industry, it could well have turned out differently. I always felt that monopolies in things like telephone service actually made sense. After all, you don't want five different companies running lines through the local area all to provide the same service. I have nostalgic feelings about the old AT&T system. The business has changed so much since then. Recently, I wanted to get at POTS line installed at my house. It had been years since we had one, but I wanted to get the VOIP line off of our Internet connection to preserve capacity for other applications. (Last time we had a POTS line, it was with BellSouth. It now appears that BellSouth doesn't even do that anymore.) The hardest thing about getting a POTS line these days is convincing the AT&T sales people that you don't want VOIP, you don't want AT&T Internet, and you don't want DirectTV. Once we got past all those sales pitches, they came out and installed the line with no problems. The other day, on a lark, we connected an old rotary phone to the line and tried to make a call ... worked like a charm.
Wen0110
there is no BellSouth
AT&T bought Bellsouth
Wen0101 Ahhh POTS yes I've heard people mention that a few times, luckily for me, my home was the house I grew up in and currently live in has the same number since I can remember and I was born in 77, and the only rotary dial phone in the house is the one in the kitchen, wall mounted Western Electric, light up dial, and when that thing rings you can hear it through the whole house. And not to mention POTS or as its called Plain Ordinary Telephone Service, is more reliable than the VoIP shit that is out there today.
It was enough to make him say, "Good grief!"
@@jamesbulldogmiller As a result of AT&T buying SBC and BellSouth, those two large regional Bell operating companies were wiped off the map in favor of a larger region for AT&T, comprising of the Midwest to the Southern and Soutwestern United States, but still, AT&T does not have the reach that it once did, thanks to the likes of Verizon and Lumen Technologies, both of which merged with their fair share of RBOCs and non-RBOCs through the years...
I was all of 13 on January 4,1984. I didn't know or care much about this at the time, but man . Watching this and looking back at it, hind sight is 2020 as they say. This absolutely had to suck for all involved.
I was born a few months later
What memories! I went from AT&T to Bellcore to NYNEX. Had good experiences before and after divestiture but I wish it had never happened.
NYNEX was the best
A huge monopoly is being broken up and people complain?
I'd be cheering!
Why is there not more views? This is a good documentary.
At 21:16 i almost expected to see that sign blow up like the swastika on the German Reichstag after WWII
Breaking up AT&T, in my opinion, was the worst thing that happened in the United States. It was the start of destroying the United States. Today is August 26th 2022
The breakup saved America, and opened the door for the modern inter-connected world we all now depend on
Don't forget, this country was built on competition - If not for the breakup The Internet as we all know it would not exist, prices for landline phone services would have just kept going up and up, cell phones would have costed 100x what they do today, smartphones most likely never would have caught on, and the simplest things, such as text messages, never would have come along
The exact same thing happened in the UK when the old post office telecommunications was split up and formed BT. They ripped the heart out of us😢
Then privitised in 1984 the same year AT&T was broke up.
Really great documentary!
I was a Western Electric employee, #124438. Today is 2018 and few people have heard of Western Electric.
That is sad, my Western Electric 2500D, manufactured in 1975, still operates wonderfully, and is the only phone that I can truly understand people as if they were in the same room as me. I bought it at a thrift store many years ago, all I did was clean it, and rewire the phone cord as it was made to hard wire into wall outlet. Truly made to last.
I've heard of it. A lot.
I know who Western Electric is, our landline phone in the kitchen to this day is wall mounted Western Electric Rotary Dial phone, that has outlasted ALL the phones we've went through in all these years. Thank you Western Electric.
Tereve Tol Do you have an extra TSPS console?
My mom, three aunts and a step dad all worked at the western electric Columbus works. My step dad stayed and worked for Ameritech after the change over
I started work at the Western Electric Atlanta Works in 1972. We made copper twisted pair cable.
On the bottom of the rotary phone sitting on a small mahogany table in the hall in my house it says .... "Property of Northwestern Bell Telephone Co." I've had the same phone and number since January, 1950.
@Richard Conte that is absolutely incorrect. Rotary phones can still be used today and still are. Most telecom companies still accept rotary dialing. If you are on VOIP, fiber, all you need is a pulse to tone converter like dialgizmo, this allows you to use your rotary on non pulse lines. You can even use these phones on a Bluetooth gateway with your cell phone if you don’t have a landline.
And those old phones were tanks. When i was a young boy in the mid 1990s, my mother had a rotary dial phone in the duplex she was living in at the time, my most fond memories are watching Mom slam the phone down on telemarketers. Now i get more telemarketer calls than ever, and just one slam and kiss my Samsung Galaxy Note goodbye. Errrrrr😡
We should have never broke up Ma Bell. Bell Labs and Western Electric were the best in the world. After the break up we lost a lot of jobs, these were good jobs, engineers, designers, techs, all the way to general labor. These companies gave a lot of American workers a lifetime of good employment. After the breakup Western Electric closed down, production was sent overseas, jobs went away.
I'm afraid it would have happened regardless, just like it did in so many other industries. Nixon never should have opened trade relations with China.
You, like many other people, make the mistake of thinking that companies exist primarily to provide jobs. They do not. They exist to satisfy human wants. We used to employ a LOT more people to feed ourselves, but the result of the advances that caused the "loss" of all those farm jobs is that farms are far, FAR more productive than they were, and we are incomparably better off for it. THAT is the true measure of WEALTH, instead of thinking in terms of "protecting jobs". Telephone service is far, FAR better than it was when ONE phone company was the only one allowed to exist.
After the breakup, New Jersey Bell under Bell Atlantic Corporation no longer service telephone equipment, does not handle long distance and are not part of AT&T.
It was a break-up that was a huge mess and unnecessary. AT&T was not in a "competitive" commercialization type of business model back then and treated that switch network like gold and took well care of it. They done more for society then any company has in history so far. If it wasn't for them we won't have the technological advances we have today and they did treat the people that works for them like family and paid well, so they took pride in their work as a result and it showed, hence the advancements that came from it. When you create uncertainty people are going to be stressed out and not preform and no longer care, or take pride in their work. When you put new companies in the mix, it about profit for that smaller company and not advancement. Then projects as well are likely going to go to the lowest bidder, not about quality anymore. That the thing Bell was large enough they could focus more on advancement. That judge did literally broke up the best system during that time and set a bad example.
If you broke up companies like Amazon then all for it as they put a lot of others out of business, by taking a loss for many years and etc and treat people as disposable.
agreed. communications infrastructure is a natural monopoly. the breakup is a historical tragedy and destroyed many good jobs and institutions
@@puntme "Natural monopoly" is a myth, promulgated to defend monopoly practices by entrenched business interests.
mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly
Phone service is much cheaper than it was under the monopolistic Bell system, particularly long distance. This is a good thing. And technological advancement hardly ceased after the breakup. The opposite is the case.
Imagine splitting amazon by regions. Could any of them even survive by itself?
Interesting how it has all come back into full circle. In the year 2019.
In the restaurant, they blamed the wrong people. The AT&T CEO should have shared the market. If they had shared with MCI, the company would still be intact. Take heed AMAZON, FACEBOOK, GOOGLE
36 years later and now AT&T owns WarnerMedia, the company that owns Warner Bros., the studios that created Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes...
But they don't *make* anything. That's the difference. It's just a name now. Bell made everything they used, right here in the us. And now... the keyboard you typed this on.. china, right? Yeah.
@@wakkowarner4288 WarnerMedia has been sold to Discovery Communications by AT&T, only to be renamed Warner Bros. Discovery after the fact. In the next decade, more and more of what's currently made in China will be instead made in Mexico, due to the tariff that was currently placed on China during the Trump administration that the Biden administration refuses to lift...
AT&T's current incarnation now owns Warner Bros.
I just hope they didn't take the wrong turn at Alberqurqe! 😅
That for sure!
As of 2022, AT&T divested themselves of Warner Media, only for Discovery Communications to merge with them and create a debacle that ends up with the loss of some modern Cartoon Network shows, including Infinity Train...Someday, Warner and Discovery will learn from this grave mistake and preserve more of its modern programming...
40 years later. It should never happen. AT&T was part of the national defense. Atlanta Bell is now Verizon.
Thanks for posting!
In 1984 it was impossible to see, but from 2018 it is now very easy to see that breaking up the monopoly was the right thing to do...
A monopolistic AT&T certainly had some advantages -- in particular, the fact that they got 100% of their equipment from Western Electric meant that they could absolutely control Western Electric's production, and direct it towards, say, solving particular problems like damaged equipment from a natural disaster, thus recovering from said natural disaster more quickly than multiple, separate companies ever could. But we traded that off for *far* cheaper long-distance costs and *far* more diverse telephone equipment with *far* greater capabilities than anyone could ever imagine in 1984. I think, long term, we clearly benefitted.
I have a brand new in the boxes Pink Trimline with the adapters for modular cords. Pink was Discontinued in 1969. I checked them and they still work. I also have some of the old rubber butt sets and colored cords from the phones to the wall. Will sell to anyone interested. NYHuguenot@aol.com
I have to disagree with you. The Consent Decree of 1982 legitimized the commercialization of the telecom business so the executives could make off and allegedly "innovate". At this time, this "monopoly" was still in the customers interest because AT&T was not in a "competitive" (err. commercialization) type of business model.
People moan and bitch about voice quality today, well that's the tradeoff. You want cheaper service, you have to cut corners. And then we have people that want to regulate the same technology that rebelled against telephony. And AT&T never had any financial illergularities or filed for bankruptcy like Nortel, MCI Worldcom, and bunch of other companies that couldn't compete post Divestiture.
@@Steveos312: AT&T was dying by the time it was absorbed by SBC. They would be out of business by now.
@@Steveos312 "The Consent Decree of 1982 legitimized the commercialization of the telecom business so the executives could make off and allegedly "innovate". "
You put innovate in quotes, implying that there's been none since 1982. That is completely false.
@@robertromero8692 I put "innovate" in air quotes because it's a very vague word that means so much to so many people.
Look where we are today, the CO is pretty much gone or on the way out, tie down and copper are fading fast and VOIP is king. This would have happened one way or another, along with multiple carriers and multiple suppliers. Now you can't even buy a smart phone made by an American owned company let alone built in the US and 5G switching comes from China.
The question is, was it easier via the breakup method or would it have been more painful without the breakup over the long run as eventually we would one way or another land in a free market no monopoly environment.
I remember playing hot potato between Bell South and AT&T over whose problem it really was, T1 failure, each claiming the problem was the others (equip verses line.) Now I would do business with neither, cable company or wireless today.
When I first started installing equipment it was manufactured in the USA now it's China and Malaysia.
@@garymckee8857 honestly the outsourcing of manufacturing has far more to do with things like NAFTA than the breakup of the bell system.
Who misses the old phone books?
I remember vacationing in Minnesota in 2003. I saw that the phone book for Qwest, the phone company in the Twin Cities, was so big, that they split it into two separate books, a yellow pages phone book and a white pages phone book...
Long Live AT&T!
I started out as a janitor with PNB in 1968 and held a lot of different jobs both as non management and management. I worked for the non reg side of USWEST then retired in 96. The break up was hard on most of us.
The pissed off union guys are straight outta central casting
After the breakup of the Bell System management discovered that training technicians cost money and that someone in an overseas call center with a flip chart could provide customer service even if they spoke English, but didn’t understand it.
POLITICS nothing more, so many good friends and people that have lost so much, the best job I ever had, and the new company kicked the old guys case aside
All I know is my phone bill prior to the breakup was $12 a month. Then after it went to $45 a month. So we the consumer were the "beneficiary' of the breakup my ass.And the biggest bone of contention was the cost of a long distance call.
I remember my Economics teacher telling me some monopoly's are good.
You teacher was wrong.
1984 they made my Dad retire from Northwestern bell...this is weird
Looks like they got broken up for being too honest a company, and sharing technology that others can make a profit on.
"How could this company be so big and not rip off the people?, Well time to break them up!"
They engage in monopoly pricing, and the lack of competition stifled innovation. That was the cause of the break up.
Divestiture provided the opportunity for multiple companies to rip off customers and increase shareholder value.
@@robertromero8692 you have no idea what you’re talking about. ATT pioneered many systems we take for granted today. If they were the same company today, we would have fiber DSL service everywhere, why because they were forced to innovate and invest.
@@Lzrdman91 No idea about what? That AT&T was a monopoly? Of course they were. There's no dispute about that. And of course they charged accordingly. There's been much more innovation since they were broken up, and long distance has gotten MUCH cheaper. That's a fact, in contrast to your speculation.
Great video! As someone born in the cellular era, the benefits of the divestiture are obvious today. It's so funny how Charles Brown said that he "doesn't buy into the technological horn of plenty" when that's exactly what happened. In the short term, the split-up might've been a pain but in the long, it was one of the best things to ever happen to the US and arguably the world.
***** Well said, I could not have explained it as good as you, I'm a former tech of AT&T, I started in 1973 working under the old Bell System. One of things we really disliked is the company started hiring outside contractors to do splicing and other work, and I don't think the quality of their work was up to par. AT&T techs took pride in their work and followed the BSP. (Bell System Practice).
Honestly I lived in a rural area in the mid 1990s and we still had a party line up until then. I wonder if the break up would have never happened would we have had private line sooner? How would cell phones happened under straight At&t? I think it was a very bad thing in many ways. Phone service has suffered as a result. However it has had many advantages. Your able to buy your own phone and even have multiple manufacturers too.
We were developing cellular telephony at Bell Labs in Naperville, Illinois, around the time of Divestiture. The name of the project was the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). My group developed the Autoplex 1000 cellular switch, which consisted of a Dimension PBX, a token-passing ring developed by Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio, and a 3B20D computer to run the whole thing. The ring tied the Dimension PBX and all the cell sites together. The cells communicated with the ring via X.25. We had a luggable cell phone (a Motorola mobile phone built into a small suitcase) that circulated around the department, so we each got to have a cell phone in our car for a week at a time. It was a fun project.
" As someone born in the cellular era, the benefits of the divestiture are obvious today."
"Words of wisdom" from an entitled Millennial who's never even made a real phone call.
"It's so funny how Charles Brown said that he "doesn't buy into the technological horn of plenty" when that's exactly what happened."
No, that's not what happened at all, much less "exactly". Technology would have progressed either way. By the way, the Bell System invented the transistor, which is the fundamental device that makes all modern electronics technology possible. Also, cell phones are not even remotely high-tech, at least not with regard to how they make phone calls. They are simply a portable radio transceiver.
"In the short term, the split-up might've been a pain but in the long, it was one of the best things to ever happen to the US and arguably the world."
No, it is a major black mark on the U.S. government. It is logically invalid and morally wrong to steal, regardless of the reasoning behind it. No one logically has a right to possess / take away or use someone else's stuff. Companies like MCI and Sprint wanted to compete, so instead of building their own infrastructure like the Bell System did, costing them an untold fortune in time and money, they can just whine to Big Brother and get to skip that part and steal usage of someone else's property? That's just one of the many acts of thuggery that took place, and the idea that it's a good thing because you like your glorified walkie-talkie, is asinine.
The U.S. had the best phone system in the world, by far, and today it is a convoluted, fractured, unreliable pile of shit complete with a bunch of made-in-China garbage connected to it (rather than ultra high quality Western Electric products). No one ever said on a Bell System call, "Can you hear me now?"
MaximRecoil as an "entitled Millenial" it's clear to me that the Bell System should have been nationalized, not shattered
I remember growing up as a kid I saw an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark on Nick at Night about the phone company controlling everything and was scared of the phone company when they would come drop off new phone books lol.
Ha ha, oh my friend.
Kinda like The Bell System Boogeyman?
what stood out for me, 1972-2015, MA BELL was trying to put smaller telcos out of business. MA BELL did this by changing their T1 format. smaller telcos couldn't afford to keep buying new equipment every time MA BELL changed the 24 channel sampling sequence. if you wanted to "talk" to MA BELL you had to buy their equipment.
it was a great journey though.. amazing.
Looking at telephony today... Not even sure I could find and point at what was. POTS is almost no more. Everything is IP, nearly gone are circuit the switches.
Yes we worried about our jobs, but also could we continue to provide the best service to our customers?
Dude, shut up.
Looking at all the comments and having remembered this era, does anybody really believe this was done for the good of the American consumer?
The breakup of AT&T made them the smallest regional Bell operating company, but they were restricted to the long distance and technological sides of the business and were not allowed to use the "bell" logo that was synonymous with the pre-breakup AT&T Bell System and the post-breakup regional Bell operating companies...
I ended up with Pacific Bell and on the first day of the split we had to park vehicles in front of the shop doors because the Techs that went to AT&T were sneaking in at night and stealing the tools and test gear.
It will happen to you too alphabet, just watching the clock till it does.
Nowadays, you call 411 information, the operator on the other line, is on the other side of the world, an accent that you cannot even understand what you’re talking about, that’s with the break up dead, ship jobs eventually to other countries, so like I always say follow the money, do you know who benefited from all this break up.,
The little guy working paycheck to paycheck, operators, they’re the ones that got shafted. Everybody else benefit from it.
Globalization brought to you the Republicans. Certainly helped Concentrate more and more of the Wealth in Fewer and Fewer Hands.
@@pjimmbojimmbo1990 exactly what they’re trying to do nowadays with these big tech companies, break them up like they did with the phone company some years ago.
didn't know much till now.. well i am bewildered
Just think about it for a moment AT&T was so massive back then with a snap of fingers they could have sent us back decades, and we would not have smartphones right now.
I own my own interconnect company and I worked in the interconnect and non Bell side of the businesss since the late seventies and I have to say that I think the predictions of improvements in technology have played out well competition Spurs growth and innovation.
I work for Bell Canada and trying to get people to join me in my pain is impossible.
🤔 hmmm...
Everything "big", except government is bad...
What would happen if they broke up big government?
Check your history there use to be the "USSR"
This was the last time the United States government ever broke up a company.
Google's parent Alphabet could be next
Aww. Poor Saul Bass Bell logos removed from the vans. 😭
It's sad what they did to AT&T
So the current AT&T is not the same as the AT&T of the 70s/80s, is that correct? The current company is actually one of the ‘baby bells’ that now brands itself AT&T? Confusing
Isn’t the host the same guy who currently hosts (or recently hosted) some New Jersey public television show ?🤔
If it were not for the breakup, we would still be “renting” landline phones. The breakup was the best thing for innovation and benefited the consumer.
Time to break up Amazon now.
....Back when Att was a good company to work for.. .
It was better they were broke up. It was a huge PITA just to get a second phone line installed in the same house before Bell was broken up.
That, and they wouldn't allow you to use any phone except the craptastic stuff they produced. Features we take for granted like call forwarding, etc, etc were nonexistent. Last but not least, dialing outside your area code was insanely expensive.
Brown got it wrong when he said that he believed that the monopoly wasn't stifling innovation, and that Bell Labs could turn out everything their customers needed and wanted.
And yes, the monopoly was stifling innovation because it actively resisted providing easy access to the physical network to its competitors. That resistance may have been well intentioned in the name of technological purity, but what he (and the monopoly) wasn't concerned with was the cost to consumers that the push for purity was exacting.
Sure, customer service was second to none. Product quality was second to none. And the price that consumers paid out of pocket for all of that? Second to none.
Consumers deserve low cost choices.
As for the telephone repair facilities? A complete waste of resources. It would have cost less money to simply trash a broken phone and send out a new one than to have these facilities with high paid low skilled technicians repairing them. And if they were such high quality devices, why were they even breaking to begin with? I guess that when you're a monopoly that will only lease equipment to customers at yearly lease rates that equal more than the cost to make them, you can write your own checks.
And the meathead phone repair plant workers complaining about losing their jobs? A lot of them were probably otherwise unemployable, and were being paid 3-4 times what they were worth to just skate along and turn a screwdriver all at the expense of the hapless consumer. There's a reason that those repair plant workers weren't offered a path into the new companies. Because they weren't capable of learning the skill set needed.
This is just an instance of the government at it's mindless best. As a consumer before and after, before was definitely better. The only good thing was forcing the Telco's to allow third party equipment to be hooked up.
I agree with you Larry,
7:03 Someone get that guy a sandwich! You can hear his stomach crying for food! lol
7:19 too 😂😂😂😂
How did y’all hear that! 🤣
Isn't AT&T one of the biggest media companies around overshadowing almost any other corporation they were split apart once they grew back even bigger than before
Monopoly or not, it was a great, competent company. I can’t say the same about the state monopoly that operated my country’s phone network until the 90s.
How did the att computer business work out
it was a big deal to work at western electric. i moved to new york tel in 1982 before the break up. i was in the dec. i was able to retire in 1996 after 29 years of service under a 6+6 early retirement. retired with a good pension and health care at 49 y.o. 21 years now and not dead. i get them good and even for retiring me. collected almost $1,000,000 in pension and benefits. Freedom to do something else like own a farm.
I remember ameritech and us west and Sprint pots service that's how old I am
I remember this....we got to buy our own phones !
They ripped us off for decades.
Sadly you are correct and those Western Electric phones were paid off 1000 times over. But they lasted forever.
So, the Justice Dept. had > 30 attorneys, and AT&T had almost double that? 0_0 wow...
Google is next
No it's not.
Didn't know hans Gruber was at att before taking over the nakatomi tower lol
What building is that at 2:01