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Ma Bell is Back
brass1 writes Ma Bell is back. It seems that for the purposes of branding, SBC is changing its name to AT&T once the acquisition is complete. Meanwhile, a great force and a high pitched whining sound has been reported from Judge Greene's grave as he spins at nearly 10K RPM."
I would argue this point: SBC is already a horrendous company to work with. And have you ever tried to get DSL service without phone service?
Do you really believe this will get better as there are fewer and fewer options?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT&T
I was gonna explain, but then I realized, Wikipedia no doubt has an article.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Ma Bell brought us the transistor. My guess is the fallout from that single invention drives about 30% of our economy. And let's not forget the development of Unix and C, and the discovery of pulsars. Sure, they were a huge slow bureaucracy, but the research arm changed our lives forever. I'll never forget you, Ma Bell. Unfortunately, the landline phone business is a dinosaur, and will never again support anything like Bell Labs. If you have a cable modem and a cell phone, landline phones are completely optional; there's no chance to reassembel the old Bell monopoly.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
These mergers in the telco industry are simply adjustmets to survive. With Muni-Wifi becoming more prevalent and VOIP cellphones coming out there is less and less need for land line telephones. Saying Ma Bell is back may be a little too strong with the amount of competition when it comes to telephone service. Its also starting to look like Internet service may be looking more like a 3 way competition with muni wifi coming to San Francisco, Anaheim, and Philly in the near future. We're actually getting more options as consumers and the telco are merging again as a result.
And yet, Linux would have still kicked UNIX's ass.
Linux is a great *nix and all that alright, but where SBC->AT&T is coming from is:
1)AIX
2)Solaris
3)HP-UX
4)???
5)Profit!
When you need a big-iron machine, such as on a big RS6000 machine with 6 or more 64-bit RISC processors, Linux still can't touch AIX for enterprise-level performance and features. Linux is perfect for small to midsize scale duty, but when you have 500+ users hitting nearly two hundred gigabytes worth of Oracle databases, you've got to use the primary o/s developed for that hardware. And even though IBM calles it AIX 5.xL (L- for Linux affinity) it ain't Linux at all, it just has a lot of Linux compatibility for recompiling written-for-Linux source code into native AIX binaries without as much hassle as in years past. Most SuSE app source code tarballs compile with ease under 5.xL and that's no coincidence.
Which carrier was it and where did you hear about this?
For landline or cells? For cells it was widely reported that they had serious issues during the blackout. The few tower sites with backup power were buried because of the traffic caused by the other sites going offline.
For landline my experiences were all local. I would assume that in larger cities they already have generators at the central offices. Around these parts (upstate NY) in a lot of the smaller villages and towns all they have is battery backup. The point that I was making was that they called crews in and deployed generators to those locations before the battery backup failed. The Blackout caused zero interruption of POTS service in almost all cases.
Contrast that with the cellular providers. I'd quote some Nextel PHB from the article I linked, "We need electricity to power our cell sites, but when you don't have that, it's out of our control" I guess Nextel has never heard of a generator.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Alexander Graham Bell and the invented the telephone.
He and several partners formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.
Management from Bell Telephone Company started another independent company called AT&T Long Lines.
In 1899 AT&T bought American Bell Telephone Company (formerly Bell Telephone Company )
In 1974 the Department of Justice broke up AT&T into the many 'Baby Bells' that are now rejoining.
That's where the "Bell" came from. As far as the "Ma" part...
According to bellsystemmemorial.com:
Where did the phrase, "Ma Bell" originate as a slang name for the Bell System or AT&T? Well, nobody seems to know for sure, but here are some possibilities submitted by members of the ATCA and TCI clubs:
"One apocryphal version is that employees of the Bell System acquired an umbilical cord effect. That is why there are very few people who ever quit the Bell System, and so many of the employees who stayed for the duration." - submitted by A. P. Bloom
"Another version is that the stock of AT&T (symbol 'T' on the New York Stock Exchange) was purchased by or for widows and orphans as a long-term investment, since its reputation for reliabilty during recessions was its selling point." - submitted by A. P. Bloom
"I worked for 'Ma Bell' for 34 yrs. Many, many years ago I was told that the term 'Ma Bell' came from a corruption of Alex Bell's wife's name, Mabel, which is pronounced May Belle, and that the company was run as a family business. The first employees were treated very well and thus referred to the company in a friendly way as Ma Bell. I also read that at the 109 Court Street, Boston location (where Bell and Watson did their earliest work on the phone in the 1870's) there was no division of labor. No us against them, managment vs labor division. Every employee was treated as an equal and listened to for ideas. A family atmosphere, thus the term "Ma Bell". True or not? I really don't know."
"When I got married in 1971 I was given one more day of vacation (for the honeymoon) than I was due. When I went to my foreman "Pop" to straighten out the mistake, I told him there was a mistake and I wasn't due the extra day. 'Pop' put his arm around my shoulder and took me aside and told me, 'the same thing happened to me when I got married; you are now part of the family and will be treated as part of the family. The flip side of the coin is that when you go out and do telephone work, you will do it like it's the family business'. I worked that way for many years. Poor craftsmanship was simply not tolerated. Your biggest critics were not the customer or your foreman, it was your coworkers. I remember several times in the 1970's being told, 'the greatest asset of our company is the goodwill of the employees'. I never heard that said again after the breakup of the company on Jan 1, 1984. If it is a family now, it certainly is a disfunctional family!" - Retired and enjoying it, Walter Smith