better Kodak reorganization

This is getting pointless. You're arguing both sides as suits your
whim, you don't know the difference between a computer and a calculator,
you don't understand how the internal accounting in large businesses
works, and you're starting to show evidence that you're uneducable.
This conversation is turning into a time-sink and I'm out of here.

In article ,
says...

On 05/10/2013 12:28 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
They bought stuff from China
and wondered why Western Electric (later spun into Lucent) had trouble
selling stuff.
"Selling stuff" was a small part of their business.
Selling stuff was the Entire business of Western Electric. They sold all
the equipment the operating companies used except maybe toilet paper and
Scotch Tape. Central Offices, PBXs, telephones, wire, ...
After the lawsuit.

Balony. They sold stuff even before they were purchased by AT&T way back
in the fogs of time.
That was Western Electric's only reason for existance (except for
defense contracting military systems such as the M-33 fire control
system, the Nike missile systems, Safeguard anti-ballistic missile
system, ...). AT&T did not keep them around as a hobby. They made all
the equipment used by the 22 operating companies for most of a century.
Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

http://history-computer.com/ModernCo...s/Stibitz.html

They made of the first transistorized computers. About that time,
in an earlier case, the Justice Department made them stop making
computers, and the teams working on them were broken up, partly by mass
resignations of people who went to work for independent computer
manufacturers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRADIC

They chose National Cash Register, not because they made great
computers, but because they were cheap. After a few years of mismanaging
NCR, they spun it off at half the price they paid for it because they
had messed it up so bad. The Sadim touch (opposite of Midas), where
everything they touched turned to $hit.

I am saying (now; I did not say this in my post) that losing that
lawsuit was a really great opportunity for the AT&T, and they wasted
that opportunity completely.
Only if you want them to be something other than what they were, the
telephone company.
They were much much more than a telephone company.
They were the telephone company. That was their core competency.

My father can lick your father.

They engaged in much
fundamental research only tangentially related to telephones. For
example, Davisson and Germer's discovery that electrons were both waves
and particles (Nobel prize in physics), Ives' discovery of retardation
of atomic clocks, invention of transistor instead of just making better
telephone relays, ...
A couple of posts earlier you said they neglected research. You're
talking out of both sides of your mouth here.


That company was in business over 100 years. The deterioration, as it
seemed to me at the time, started in the early 1970s, although it
probably was already happening at the time of the Carterphone decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

For decades, they were possibly the premier technical research
laboratory in the world. For decades, they were getting a patent a day.
And 13 Nobel prizes. They did not get them for the Princess telephone.

From about 1925 until I left at the end of 1989, the Bell Labs
presidents had a pretty good idea of the importance of basic research,
for example. Problems ensued when AT&T and Western Electric (joint
owners of Bell Labs) got too interested in short-term development and
did not understand that basic research was the future. Bell Labs'
charter ensured that both basic research and product development were
done. It is my impression that basic research was about 10% of what was
done there, and development was around 75% or so. Then in the 1980s,
some badly understood work was started on a huge scale, gobbling up
resources including management attention. President of Bell Labs was a
big deal until about then, but the bean counters at AT&T did not
understand research (or even development, actually), and things went to
hell.

Think about the economy of the United States and how Bell Labs affected
it. If Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley had been told to design better
relay contacts, and if they did not quit, they would have designed
better relay contacts. Instead, they were interested in the physics of
the solid state. What has that to do with telephones? They just invented
the transistor, that's all. It is true that AT&T never made a success at
manufacturing transistors, but companies like Texas Instruments,
Fairchild, RCA, Philco, and a few others made a success of it. Changed
the economy of the whole world. Now there is a computer in my cell
phone, several computers in my car, ... . That cell phone has more
compute power than the IBM 704 I first used in the late 1950s that cost
$680/ an hour to rent and required two trained operators per shift to
run it.

On 05/10/2013 10:48 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
This is getting pointless.
It sure is, and that is because ...
You're arguing both sides as suits your
whim,
Well, I was there for over 25 years, and while I do not know everything,
I sure know a lot.
One reason why you think I am arguing both sides is that the culture and
management style changed from time to time. Not enough to save the
institution, but it did change, so comments about one era not
surprisingly did not apply to another era.

you don't know the difference between a computer and a calculator,
Now you are being stupid. You have no evidence of that one way or another.
As it happens, I have designed small computer systems, written operating
systems, compilers, a relational database management system, and lots of
other stuff. To do that, I surely would have needed to know that. And
these days, it is more difficult to distinguish one from another. In the
1950s, the distinction was quite clear. Machines with a stored program
were computers, and those without were calculators.

you don't understand how the internal accounting in large businesses
works,

Not especially, and that is important because?

and you're starting to show evidence that you're uneducable.

How would you know? Have you been trying to educate me and failed? If so, I did not even realize you were attempting education. What were you trying to educate me about?

This conversation is turning into a time-sink and I'm out of here.


Oh! Good!

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

PeterN wrote:
On 5/9/2013 12:48 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
So you're saying that the MCI lawsuit that resulted in the breakup of
AT&T into 7 different companies and forced the divestiture of Western
Electric and Bell Labs was not the major factor in the decline of AT&T?


See my prior post. It was not. The problem is when you
put money into research and development, it adversely
impacts the bottom line, for accounting purposes. Lower
bottom line = lower bonuses for management.

Neither of those descriptions relate to the history of AT&T.

Think "Information Age". In 1940 it was a company based
on the economics of message traffic. By 1960 there were
predictions on when revenue from message traffic would
drop below revenue from byte oriented data traffic.

Corporate AT&T was frozen and unable to respond to the
changes that occured as those predictions became true.

Literally within months of the day the data traffic
revenues rose above message traffic revenues the AT&T
Board of Directors threw in the towel, disolved the
company as it existed, sold off the parts, and went
home.

Now that is a fine piece of revisionism.

It is history, and a fact. Look it up.

What it also is, is relatively unknown. There are
probably very few people outside of the telecom industry
that were even aware of that change in revenue
generation, and of course the predictions and tracking
of it were and are proprietary information that was not
typically divulged outside of AT&T.

But if you carefully look at changes made by the Board
of Directors in the 1990's, particularly with new CEO's,
every single change was intended to shift executive
management away from the corporate culture that saw
message traffic as the source of all operating revenue
(which had been the very basis of the Bell System
monopoly prior to Judge Green's ruling).

None of those selected from within the company were able
to redirect a staid and entrenched management. So they
went outside the company. And what they learned was that
it just wasn't possible.

So you're saying that somehow MCI just conveniently filed suit and the
Justice Department conveniently ruled on exactly the scheduled that AT&T
wanted?

You do realize that MCI had virtually nothing at all to do with
the Modified Final judgement from Green? That was between the DOJ
and ATT, and it was in fact as much a product of ATT as it was from
the DOJ.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article ,
says...

On 05/09/2013 01:02 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...

When they were finally
allowed to make computers for other purposes than just driving
electronic central offices, they mismanaged that so badly that they
decided to stop that and to buy an existing computer company instead.

They wouldn't have had to make computers for any other purpose without
the lawsuit.

Sure they would.

Why?

Because all switching systems from the advent of the crossbar on
were in fact computers.

For a very loose definition of "computer".

A crossbar switch is a mechanical computer. In the
1940's it was the most advanced computer in existence.

When common control, not just of the computer but of the entire
signaling system for the PSTN, was implemented there was no way
to operate any telecom system without computers.

And yet somehow it was managed.

But not without computers.

The Public Switched Telephone Network in the US first
began using Common Channel Signaling in the 1960's, with
2400 kbps modem channels used to transmit signaling
information for interoffice trunks. The entire network
of course required computers to control the signaling of
all CCIS trunking.

CCIS was matched to Common Control as implemented in the
trunk switches themselves. And later it was extended to
line switching offices, and with SS7 became very much a
distributed computing network rather than a
client/server packet network.

They used lots of computers internally, and they wanted
to sell them.

Which would be moving away from their core competency.

That depends on which computers. First, Bell Labs most
certainly had some of the finest computer research being
done, going back to the beginning no matter how you want
to define "beginning". But second, of "core competency"
means telecommunications, as in selling switching
systems to the rest of the world, then selling computers
was absolutely part of their core competency.

AT&T's main line of business was not "selling switching system to the
rest of the world". They were a service company with hardware
secondary. Their core competency was delivering telephone service
cheaply and reliably.

The core competency included design and manufacture of
telephone switching systems, which they clearly did sell
"to the rest of the world". And that of course had a history
going all the way back to the late 1800's.

They were early pioneers in making computers even before
WW-II.

Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

Everything related to "digital" that produced a digital
computer, was based on Bell Labs research. Crossbar
switching systems were first installed during WWII
(1943), but of course the mass of R&D that that produced
them was done much prior.

PCM of course was fully specified back in the 1930's.

You have not demonstrated the existence of a computer made by AT&T prior
to WWII.

Please look up what a crossbar switching system is!

And note that a detailed reference to AT&T's computational
crossbar computers, developed prior to WWII, has been cited
elsewhere in response to your erroneous statement.

That was your assertion, not that research into digital
signalling was conducted.

Common control digital signaling is not possible without
computers.

Perhaps you don't understand that the word
"computer" is not a generic catch-all for digital technology--a 7401
quad nand gate is a digital device, but it is a long way from being a
computer.

I clearly understand the history of the PSTN. And I
note that Jean-David Beyer also has a very good
recollection of how it functioned. I suppose that it is
complex and different enough from other electronics
industries that it isn't easy to sort it out without
having been part of it for decades.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

"J. Clarke" wrote:
This is getting pointless. You're arguing both sides as suits your
whim, you don't know the difference between a computer and a calculator,
you don't understand how the internal accounting in large businesses
works, and you're starting to show evidence that you're uneducable.
This conversation is turning into a time-sink and I'm out of here.

Ad Hominem won't get you points in this discussion. The
fact is that your comments have lacked knowledge of the
telecommunications industry, its technology, and the
history of its politics.

Trust that whatever you know about "internal accounting
in large businesses", or for that matter anything else
learned in a different industry, did not apply to a
regulated regulated telcom monopoly. (An example: I
regularly used to charter an aircraft all day long
because that would guarantee I'd be home in less that 12
hours. Double time was an avoidable red flag signaling
bad managment. One hour of double time was worse than
spending hundreds of dollars an hour wait time for an
aircraft, because that was an indication work was
getting done!)

Heh, if you want to know how it worked... find some of
Scott Adams' first Dilbert cartoons. Originally Dilbert
was all insider jokes about management of the Bell
System.

In article ,
says...

On 05/10/2013 12:28 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
They bought stuff from China
and wondered why Western Electric (later spun into Lucent) had trouble
selling stuff.
"Selling stuff" was a small part of their business.
Selling stuff was the Entire business of Western Electric. They sold all
the equipment the operating companies used except maybe toilet paper and
Scotch Tape. Central Offices, PBXs, telephones, wire, ...
After the lawsuit.

Balony. They sold stuff even before they were purchased by AT&T way back
in the fogs of time.
That was Western Electric's only reason for existance (except for
defense contracting military systems such as the M-33 fire control
system, the Nike missile systems, Safeguard anti-ballistic missile
system, ...). AT&T did not keep them around as a hobby. They made all
the equipment used by the 22 operating companies for most of a century.

True.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

On 05/09/2013 04:19 PM, Floyd L. Davidson wrote:
Think "Information Age". In 1940 it was a company based
on the economics of message traffic. By 1960 there were
predictions on when revenue from message traffic would
drop below revenue from byte oriented data traffic.

Corporate AT&T was frozen and unable to respond to the
changes that occured as those predictions became true.

Reminds me of a direct experience I had of that. I was an MTS at Bell
Labs at the time (around 1980, I guess) in a development area. In our
department, several of the people wanted to investigate packet switching
in general, and what the development of such a technology would mean as
far as support from the network would be concerned.

Just like when my grandfather was a director of electro-optical research
and investigating television possibilities in the early 1920s. That had
nothing to do with telephones either. His real interest was in physics,
relativity, optics, photoelectric effect.... But management was
enlightened in those days. So he did it and they demonstrated television
in about 1927, and color television soon after. This turned out to be
extremely valuable to the bottom line, because when commercial
television became a big deal just after WW-II, guess who knew what
bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio would be needed by the networks?
Guess who had prepared for this, and had the equipment ready?

Well studying packet switched networks, instead of the old circuit
switched networks, would have been a big deal. ARPAnet was just getting
started in those days, and the networking implications were not yet well
understood. So it would have been a really worthwhile project for a
small number (much less than 10) people to study. Management prohibited
working on it, so those people quit and went to work for competitors of
ours. Our director said that 98 percent of our business was voice, and
that data would never amount to much. In our business, they had no
understanding of what data was. They understood voice, facsimile,
television. They lumped what they did not understand into the category
of data and ignored it. Cisco systems came into being and they did
understand "data." They were not alone. They are still in business.
AT&T, except for the name, is not.

On 05/10/2013 12:13 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
Their research department produced Unix

That is another interesting story. Bell Labs wrote the operating systems
for the IBM machines we were using at the time. We recognized that
continuing along that line, with big batch-processing systems was going
to dead-end with the 7094-II machines. It did not look like the
System/360s would be a success. It seemed as though multi-user time
sharing systems would be the way of the future. But IBM was not
interested in that, but GE was. So Bell Labs, MIT, and GE teamed up and
GE made the 645 computers and Bell Labs and MIT cooperated in writing
MULTICS. Well it was a little ahead of its time and a commercial
failure. GE sold off their computer division to Honeywell, and Bell Labs
dropped out of the project. Word came down from above: we will never
write another operating system. Well Ken and Dennis fortunately were in
research at Bell Labs, and they had a PDP 9 (or whatever the one before
the PDP/11 was, and not the PDP 10) sitting around the lab, so they
decided to build an OS somewhat like MULTICS, but that would run on a
single processor. One thing lead to another, and they called it UNIX.
Their department head, being an enlightened engineer himself, supported
that. Basically, it was done in spite of what top management decreed.
This is an oversimplification of what happened, but it is long enough.

A few years later, I had an 11/45 with memory management hardware. And I
needed it to work. At that time, UNIX did not support that, so my
department head called Ken ad asked for him to implement memory
management, and that was all the excuse he needed to get an 11/45 of his
own and do it. This would have been in the early 1970s, I suppose. By
the time I left, I do not think that would have been possible.

On Fri, 10 May 2013 11:14:12 -0800, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article ,
says...

On 05/09/2013 01:02 PM, J. Clarke wrote:
In article ,
says...

When they were finally
allowed to make computers for other purposes than just driving
electronic central offices, they mismanaged that so badly that they
decided to stop that and to buy an existing computer company instead.

They wouldn't have had to make computers for any other purpose without
the lawsuit.

Sure they would.

Why?

Because all switching systems from the advent of the crossbar on
were in fact computers.

For a very loose definition of "computer".

A crossbar switch is a mechanical computer. In the
1940's it was the most advanced computer in existence.

Debatable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

When common control, not just of the computer but of the entire
signaling system for the PSTN, was implemented there was no way
to operate any telecom system without computers.

And yet somehow it was managed.

But not without computers.

The Public Switched Telephone Network in the US first
began using Common Channel Signaling in the 1960's, with
2400 kbps modem channels used to transmit signaling
information for interoffice trunks. The entire network
of course required computers to control the signaling of
all CCIS trunking.

CCIS was matched to Common Control as implemented in the
trunk switches themselves. And later it was extended to
line switching offices, and with SS7 became very much a
distributed computing network rather than a
client/server packet network.

They used lots of computers internally, and they wanted
to sell them.

Which would be moving away from their core competency.

That depends on which computers. First, Bell Labs most
certainly had some of the finest computer research being
done, going back to the beginning no matter how you want
to define "beginning". But second, of "core competency"
means telecommunications, as in selling switching
systems to the rest of the world, then selling computers
was absolutely part of their core competency.

AT&T's main line of business was not "selling switching system to the
rest of the world". They were a service company with hardware
secondary. Their core competency was delivering telephone service
cheaply and reliably.

The core competency included design and manufacture of
telephone switching systems, which they clearly did sell
"to the rest of the world". And that of course had a history
going all the way back to the late 1800's.

They were early pioneers in making computers even before
WW-II.

Do tell us about the computer that AT&T made before WWII.

Everything related to "digital" that produced a digital
computer, was based on Bell Labs research. Crossbar
switching systems were first installed during WWII
(1943), but of course the mass of R&D that that produced
them was done much prior.

PCM of course was fully specified back in the 1930's.

You have not demonstrated the existence of a computer made by AT&T prior
to WWII.

Please look up what a crossbar switching system is!

And note that a detailed reference to AT&T's computational
crossbar computers, developed prior to WWII, has been cited
elsewhere in response to your erroneous statement.

That was your assertion, not that research into digital
signalling was conducted.

Common control digital signaling is not possible without
computers.

Perhaps you don't understand that the word
"computer" is not a generic catch-all for digital technology--a 7401
quad nand gate is a digital device, but it is a long way from being a
computer.

I clearly understand the history of the PSTN. And I
note that Jean-David Beyer also has a very good
recollection of how it functioned. I suppose that it is
complex and different enough from other electronics
industries that it isn't easy to sort it out without
having been part of it for decades.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Fri, 10 May 2013 11:31:50 -0800, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

"J. Clarke" wrote:
This is getting pointless. You're arguing both sides as suits your
whim, you don't know the difference between a computer and a calculator,
you don't understand how the internal accounting in large businesses
works, and you're starting to show evidence that you're uneducable.
This conversation is turning into a time-sink and I'm out of here.

Ad Hominem won't get you points in this discussion. The
fact is that your comments have lacked knowledge of the
telecommunications industry, its technology, and the
history of its politics.

Trust that whatever you know about "internal accounting
in large businesses", or for that matter anything else
learned in a different industry, did not apply to a
regulated regulated telcom monopoly. (An example: I
regularly used to charter an aircraft all day long
because that would guarantee I'd be home in less that 12
hours. Double time was an avoidable red flag signaling
bad managment. One hour of double time was worse than
spending hundreds of dollars an hour wait time for an
aircraft, because that was an indication work was
getting done!)

Heh, if you want to know how it worked... find some of
Scott Adams' first Dilbert cartoons. Originally Dilbert
was all insider jokes about management of the Bell
System.

You should see http://www.dilbert.com/first_50/


In article ,
says...

On 05/10/2013 12:28 AM, J. Clarke wrote:
They bought stuff from China
and wondered why Western Electric (later spun into Lucent) had trouble
selling stuff.
"Selling stuff" was a small part of their business.
Selling stuff was the Entire business of Western Electric. They sold all
the equipment the operating companies used except maybe toilet paper and
Scotch Tape. Central Offices, PBXs, telephones, wire, ...
After the lawsuit.

Balony. They sold stuff even before they were purchased by AT&T way back
in the fogs of time.
That was Western Electric's only reason for existance (except for
defense contracting military systems such as the M-33 fire control
system, the Nike missile systems, Safeguard anti-ballistic missile
system, ...). AT&T did not keep them around as a hobby. They made all
the equipment used by the 22 operating companies for most of a century.

True.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

Eric Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 10 May 2013 11:14:12 -0800, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

"J. Clarke" wrote:
In article , says...

Because all switching systems from the advent of the crossbar on
were in fact computers.

For a very loose definition of "computer".

A crossbar switch is a mechanical computer. In the
1940's it was the most advanced computer in existence.

Debatable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

We were talking about pre-WWII though.

The No4 crossbar switch as a commercial product was
first installed in 1943. The first prototype of the
Colossus was demonstrated that same year.

The point is that during the early development, when the
first crossbar switches/computers were being produced
for research purposes, there was nothing more advanced.

Of course by the time the crossbar switch was a
commercial product there was indeed a research computer
that as should be expect was more advanced.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)