5963 computer grade dual triode production dates 3515

Davidson)

In your "sprinty" frame of reference, perhaps so. I remember when SP started Southern Pacific INTernal Communications with some Lenkurt 775A radio and 46-type MUX. That, of course, was the beginning of "Sprint." It was rinky-dink from the start, with 50 dBrnC0 of noise being normal and echo that would knock SF units back on-hook every call. After its "pin drop" heyday, it's now just mashed up with Nextel, and they're both dying.

They failed to 1.) realize that after 1984 they weren't running and leading the industry anymore, 2.) pooh-poohed Motorola's cellular advances even after the Labs and WE said it was "the future,", 3.) failed horrendously at the burgeoning PC market, and thus declared PCs to be "useless to our strategy," a crucial mistake that cost them dearly, 4.) tried to cover up top management screwups by buying piece parts of other companies, or whole companies, such as NCR, Paradyne, WUT's EasyLink business, COMSAT's old earth stations and many, many others, 5.) failed to capitalize on a huge domestic manufacturing infrastructure that Allen simply destroyed becaue of all the damage he'd done to it while at Western Electric, 6.) failed absolutely miseraby at marketing anything at all, due to the fact that marketing was driven from HQ and a cadre of VPs, with disastrous results (Remember the "I-Plan" campaign? Another one of Allen's personal babies, like the ridiculous Olivetti PC deal, and it cost AT&T dearly in both subscribers and reputation), 7.) wasted tens of billions of dollars in solvent buttets on stupid and-or ill advised acquisitions favored by Allen & Co., (NCR, Paradyne, McCaw, the list goes on forever) while destroying any of the in-house infrastructure left that could have been prudently utilized, 8.) allowed McGowan's MCI to grab the Internet backbone because of 3 above, and also allowed them, by basically not paying attention to MCI's political shenanigans with the RayGun Administration, to grab the very lucrative DCTN contract that replaced AUTOVON, 9.) grabbed Craig McCaw's fly-by-night cell company in an act of desperation after Allen realized that the Labs were right about cellular, and got saddled with McCaw on his own board, who helped accellerate T's decline, 11.) peeed away Bell Labs and Sandia Labs because "R&D is too costly," and many, many other expensive and strategic goofs and miscues.

Allen was the "no vision thing" at AT&T. Olsen before him DID have enough strategic vision to get into the international arena (I was in on that), but died before fully implementing what he had in mind. Allen trashed it all, preferring to concentrate on one failed pet project after another. Although he's remembered as having NCR as his biggest boner, there were many, many others.

For money only. As far as what was going on down on the field, everyone there for awhile was doing their own thing...it was a mess, because people HAD to be creative to try to survive. Without any clear cut idea of what basic company goals were and patheticly self-interested leadership at the top, what we wound up with was several "mini-companies," each competing with each other for funding and political favor. Allen set this up by buying the "Total Quality Managment" how-to-run-a corporation seminar scam, chewing AT&T up into competing "business units." All during the Allen malaise, there was absolutely NO idea of what we were doing or where we were headed...none. That's how yutzes like Joe Naccio gained so much power within AT&T...and caught the eye of Allen...and proceeded to ruin the company. Naccio went on to do the failed US Telecom 10-10-321 thing, then went to prison. He and Ebbers would make good cellies.

No way in hell. That was the really old AT&T, back in the era long before Allen got out of Illinois Bell. District managers by the time Allen was running things were spending every penny of whatever budget they could sneak by the VP committees on basically whatever they wanted, usually to build what they thought would be a "fool proof" business that Allen's handlers couldn't get rid of. At the D4 level, there was NO accountability as far as results...just "give back" 10% at the end of the year when Allen needed it to make the balance sheet look good, and you got taken care of.

A lot of good people kept that company running long after it should have collapsed, only to be jettisoned for going against the grain at the hands of headquarters "yes men.". That changed a lot with Armstrong, but by the time he got in there, the damage had been done, and what was left was basically an unsteerable burned out hulk, technologically 10 years behind the times and doomed. Couple that with the fact that Armstrong had no clue about telecom at all, and you have a recipe for what happened...a buyout at a fire sale price.

The experience at Eastman Kodak shows that big, old companies don't have to go that way, IF they have competent top management with clear, attainable goals in mind. Another example of "AT&T-itis" that predated this by years was Sunbeam, ruined by "Hacksaw" Reynolds. Another one that'll fail sooner or later will be GE, pointed down a destructive path by "Neutron Jack" Welch, one of the biggest jackbuttes I think I've ever seen. GE currently is running on momentum, similar to what AT&T was doing for years. Once that energy is spent, the rest spiral starts, and it's all over. Allen, like Welch, set the course; it doesn't matter who comes after, unless there's some major interdiction happening fast enough to alter course severely. In AT&T's case, Armstrong could not supply that countering force to AT&T's rest spiral...he simply didn't know what he was doing, and was wrapped around the axle trying to unsnare many of Allen's arcane and questionable financial arrangment brought on by the acquisition of NCR and many other failed expenditures. Prior to Allen, AT&T was so rich in cash that it was the joke that the new HQ building was built basically as a huge vault.

Those there at the time say otherwise. NorTel grabbed that much share so fast due to two things: they were cheap, and they allowed the RBOCs and indies to get out from under the thumb of AT&T completely, both with the switch and the WECO installers. The RBOCs would learn not long afterward that having WECO installers hanging around with 30+ years of experience in their offices was a value added thing that NorTel could not begin to provide.

SBC vs. Alaska...I'll take SBC's experience, sorry.

True, a "make work" installation, like many XBAR additions in the '70s, knowing that an ESS would be coming very soon, were "make work" deals. This made cash flow from the buttociated companies and Long Lines into Western Electric, thus making the telcos and AT&T look like they had high overhead, while making WECO look profitable on its own. Who designed this? Allen, while we was running (ruining?) Western Electric. His scams had the full support of the Board, I might add, while long time mid and VP level managers knew it was a house of cards with Divesbreasture right around the corner and that Allen's WECO had been picking the pockets of the buttociated companies for years to "cook the books." Thus, after being robbed for 10 years prior to being "divested," it was a natural that all seven RBOCs would beat a path to NorTel's door.

Lucent's biggest customer is SBC, now the "new AT&T." The old AT&T wasn't for years...with declining traffic, they simply had no need for new switches! They did buy a raft of new 4Es in the '90s that were supposed to do toll and tandem for their stillborn local service. Many never carried service and some are sitting mothballed, while others were turned over to Wireless. Running a close second on Lucent's scorecard is Verizon.

Again, talk to the people at SBC. Even the mention of early DMS curls their hair. As one retired district switch manager told me, their peg counts for outages, slow completions and reroutes more than quadrupled once NorTel DMSes took the traffic. Software messes were a huge issue, and NorTel didn't seem to be able to address them timely. Lucent learned, after being taken off the Bell System and AT&T breasts, that they HAD to service customer needs, or die off. Software revisions for 4 and 5Es went from being months in development to sometimes days, if an emergecy cropped up. That would've been totally impossible in the old days. I'm sure NorTel's response is far better now, but then?

Pac Bell sure did an about face. After Ginn took control of the newly divested PB in '84, he went running pell mell to NorTel to get out from under AT&T, and NorTel was having trouble filling demand. AT&T thought that, being "Bell legacy" companies, they'd naturally come back for switches, and that did not happen...another exmaple of AT&T HQ idiocy. All that came to a screeching halt in a scant three years due to the failure rates and lack of NorTel support. GTE, for all their bumbling, even steered clear of NorTel for the most part, even when it became obvious that their GTD5 wasn't what they'd hoped. Same thing happened down in Texas with SWB. Ameritech and US West, the two losers, went headlong into big contracts with NorTel, and we know what happened to them, don't we?

You like NorTel. I know enough about them to stay way away. That's just the way it is. Not that it matters a whit, since I'm retired, and the whole industry can go to hell in a handbasket as far as I care. Just keep the pension checks rolling in. Meanwhile, I can always wallpaper my bathroom with all those T stock certificates. Even today, looking at my cost basis, wallpaper's probably worth more.