Metroliner telephone article 4131

Wanna bet? (I was engaged in kicking telco management in the teeth about just exactly that, as a sport, at the time...)

What does Bell Labs have to do with management of a telephone company? Don't confuse the two. AT&T had one toe of one foot *very* deeply into development of computer networking... and no other part of its entire body knew it existed. Which is to say that there were indeed a handful of people on the payroll who knew about it. They were *not* managing telephone operations.

Telephone companies (virtually all of them, including AT&T) right up to the middle 90's when the whole world woke up and discovered the Internet, were blissfully ignorant. Most people in the business didn't realize that a "digital switch" *is* a computer. (And last time I knew, AT&T *still* didn't...)

Judge Green released them from that *before* ISDN, or for that matter the Internet, was significant.

You have to separate what research people at Bell Labs were doing from what telephone company management was doing. For that matter, it is also necessary to separate manufacturing and higher level support for switching systems from what telephone company management was doing.

Unfortunately for AT&T, the upper and middle levels of management were all very tightly bound to the grip that AT&T Long Lines had always had on AT&T. If it didn't recognize message traffic as the bread and butter of the company, it didn't go anywhere. Data and computer software, hardware or networking were simply *never* going anywhere.

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