Clem Cole wrote:

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:49 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:

There's another aspect of this that I think that many people misunderstand
which is that Judge Green gave AT&T exactly what they wanted. AT&T knew
that in the future the money was in data and were willing to trade their
monopoly for that business. From their perspective, it worked. For the
rest of us, not so good.

For AT&T (which no longer is a company since the current AT&T is really AT&T in name only.
SBC Communications bought AT&T Corp. on November 18, 2005, and changed its name to AT&T Inc. (The real AT&T
is no longer...)

Some of us remember the days in which phones were reliable and you could
understand the person on the other end. Or when your phone lasted 60+
years. Or the current debate about whether it's ok to eliminate exchange
powered phones that work in an emergency.

During the primaries when Ted Cruz would stand up and hold a dial phone
and say "this is what government regulation got you" I always thought
"Yeah, give me more of that. It's 60 years old, still works better than
what you can get today, and if you hurl it across the room it'll still
work which is more than you can say for anything made post-split."

Not to mention it ended one of the best research labs in history.

Amen brother Jon....

And it also helped cause the end of a number of computer companies, including NCR, DEC, Pyramid Technologies...

The bad decisions AT&T made once they got into the computer hardware business were legendary.

They had product support problems (replaced a significant quantity of 6300 motherboards on their PC for an MS-DOS clock problem they introduced by clearing the seconds in the RTC chip at each boot)... They had issues with their Field Service techs being unwilling to work on Pyramid OS/x boxes under Unix (AT&T System 7000) because that was system software and they were only willing to work with a (nonexistant on Pyramid) offline diagnostics set.

An AT&T Union tech walkout from Pyramid classes was averted on that one... They were not too successful selling Alliant FX/1 and FX/8 boxes as AT&T machines as well. I worked for both computer companies in service and training and saw this first hand.AT&T was to hand AT&T Business cards to Alliant Service personnel to handle the customers.

They tried to sell the 3b20 simplex box against the Vax into scientific markets only to find that although the integer performance was superior... Scientific use really needs hardware floating point. The later 3b line got much better but the first entry was frightenening

Unfortunately, half of Pyramid's sales were through OEM's (Siemens-Nixdorf and AQT&T mostly) so the ton of business dropped immediately once the NCR deal took hold. It happened just as Pyramid moved to DCOS/x (Their SVR4 port to MIPS). This killed a ton of growth and the deal to move the US Internal Revenue from System III based Zilog Zeus boxes to Pyramid...

Sometimes you can't always get what you want. Sometimes when you get it you screw yourself into the ground.

AT&T, I was told, couldn't figure out how MCI could undercut them in long distance. The experts said -- we have the network in place and paid for and there's no way we could do it for under 10c per minute... They didn't figure MCI (later LDDS) could cook the books to make the numbers look better.

Back in '84 DEC was to train me as a Unix admin and act as the outsource contractor supplier to AT&T. This would've had one source of service and support for all their Vaxes and eliminated the large collection of Sysadmin and Operator suppliers. Pre-IBM Global Services type stuff. The wife was at the Labs at the time and they supposedly announced it. Rumor says a DEC and AT&T merger about the same time fell apart. Perhaps the history is buried in the DEC Archives now in the Computer Museuum. I was told I was in on the deal in Oct/Nov 1983 or
84 and it fell apart the next January or so.

Bill