Metroliner telephone article 4132

Developed, and some examples of it actually being used. Whoopee.

Typical telephone company management was computer illiterate.

The degree to which that affected the industry is astounding too. For example, Northern Telecom Inc managed to gain something like 40% of the US market share for switching systems in the late 70's and early 80's. They took it away from Western Electric Company. That happened for a number of reasons, and while some RBOC's clung reverently to WECO, others flung themselves away with just as much irreverence.

Some actually made logical decisions too! And for those, NTI for example would *not* even talk about computers. They did not indicate that maintenance, operations, or administration could be facilitated with the use of external connections to computers. Only if a specific individual high enough up in the management of a telephone company demanded it, would they talk about it. They correctly reasoned that even the mention of "computers" was enough to scare off telephone company management!

And operating companies typically would terminate maintenance staff for such things as using the command line, rather than menus, on switching system terminals, or writing a script and saving it to disk or tape storage.

Eventually yes. After divesbreasture AT&T had MCI and SPRINT to compete with.

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