The Return of Ma Bell

By Jerry Pournelle

March 20, 2006

(The Return of Ma Bell :  Page 1 of 1 )

Both financial and general news pages carry it as a big story: AT&T was just taken over by SBC, which itself took over Pacific Bell and other chunks of the former AT&T empire. The new company will be called AT&T, and now the new AT&T wants to buy out BellSouth, which will give it complete control of Cingular as well.

Judge Green thought he had killed Ma Bell dead, but The Phone Company seems to be rising from the grave. AT&T isn't yet what the old AT&T was (they even spell it at&t for no comprehensible reason), but it's headed that way, and it may not be long before it's all reconstituted.

Of course it's not quite the same. The old AT&T was a regulated public utility. It was guaranteed a profit, and it didn't need any skills in marketing, which is just as well because it didn't have any. I recall back before Judge Green's decision when AT&T tentatively tried its luck in building and marketing small computers. They made darned good ones. We had one here that ran both PC DOS and UNIX, and had pretty good communications between the two operating systems. AT&T made great mini-computers, and I had one of those too. It was both powerful and reliable for the times, with robust fault tolerant provisions; not a lot of power compared to today's machines, but impressive at the time. AT&T technology was good.

Their marketing was inept. I was about the only columnist writing about AT&T's machines. You almost never heard about the AT&T computers in the computer magazines, or newspapers, or indeed anywhere else except at COMDEX where they had big booths but little presence. I got my AT&T computers by bullying a sales engineer I met at the COMDEX booth into inviting me up to the AT&T Suite where I met some executives who apparently thought the notion of sending review machines to reviewers was a splendid new idea and they were glad they had thought of it.

At another Chicago COMDEX in that era I found myself talking to the then VP of marketing of the AT&T Computer division. For some reason I made bold to say "I like your computers, but you aren't going anywhere with them.

 Page 1 of 1