*So long, Death Star. You were never at ease with
yourself after you gave up that Bell.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705att.html
Woe to the bellheads and pole-climbers
The End of AT&T
Ma Bell may be gone, but its innovations are everywhere
By Michael Riordan
It's 1974. Platform shoes are the height of urban fashion. Disco is just getting into full stride. The Watergate scandal has paralyzed the U.S. government. The new Porsche 911 Turbo helps car lovers at the Paris motor show briefly forget the recent Arab oil embargo. And the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. is far and away the largest corporation in the world.
AT&T's US $26 billion in revenues—the equivalent of $82 billion today—represents 1.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The next-largest enterprise, sprawling General Motors Corp., is a third its size, dwarfed by AT&T's $75 billion in assets, more than 100 million customers, and nearly a million employees.
AT&T was a corporate Goliath that seemed as immutable as Gibraltar. And yet now, only 30 years later, the colossus is no more.
Of the many events that contributed to the company's long decline, a crucial one took place in the autumn of that year. On 20 November 1974, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the antitrust suit that would end a decade later with the breakup of AT&T and its network, the Bell System, into seven regional carriers, the Baby Bells. AT&T retained its long-distance service, along with Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., its legendary research arm, and the Western Electric Co., its manufacturing subsidiary.
From that point on, the company had plenty of ups and downs. It started new businesses, spun off divisions, and acquired and sold companies. But in the end it succumbed. Now AT&T is gone.
The company—still a telecom giant but more focused on the corporate market—agreed to be acquired by one of the Baby Bells, SBC Communications Inc. of San Antonio, in a deal valued at $16 billion. In a few months, AT&T's famous ticker symbol—T, for telephone—will disappear from the New York Stock Exchange listings, and the company that grew out of Alexander Graham Bell's original telephone patents will officially cease to exist.
