|
Source: "Black-Cord Fever" by Rita Mae Brown,
Bell Telephone Magazine, 1983, No. 3-4, page 33.
Please Note:
Minor additions, modifications or deletions may occur on this website from
time to time without such action published on this page.
December 21, 2007
Finally, after thirteen months of trying to transfer the
bellsystemmemorial.com domain from
IPOWERWEB, today it is now unified with the family of
Porticus domain names. Thank you to David Massey for putting pressure on
IPOWERWEB to release the domain name. All we can say about IPOWERWEB is
that their customer service is not very responsive and has caused nothing but
aggravation and wasted time in attempting to get something that should be
relatively simple to accomplish. But all that said, we welcome back
bellsystemmemorial.com to the family.
June 30, 2007
BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises)
Reaches Definitive Agreement to be Acquired By Investor Group Led by Teachers,
Providence and Madison - BCE Board Recommends Shareholders Accept C$42.75
(US$40.13) Per Share Offer.
This marks the end of an era for an
Independent Bell Canada, a company that traces its roots back to days of the
Bell System and Melville and Alexander Graham Bell.
Click here
to read the official BCE news release.
June 24, 2007
The 1983 No. 3/4 Special Commemorative Issue of the Bell
Telephone Magazine is finally up on the site. This was the last published
before the divesture of the Bell System
Click here
to see the issue in the original format.
June 16, 2007
The Bell Canada page has been updated with the new format.
Click
here
to see the new changes.
June 10, 2007
The Retirees Information page has been updated with new links
and information. Also, those of you who used to work for the equipment
side of the Bell System might find the following news article of interest.
For the more than 300 people who packed a hall in
the Bossier Civic Center on Saturday, the line never stopped at Shreveport's
landmark high-tech manufacturing plant on Mansfield Road.
May 14, 2007
Two sections to the Bell System Memorial site have been
updated with the new look. The Trading Post and the Yellow Pages have been
re-configured with new information and old information deleted. Work will
begin in the coming weeks to finally scan and upload the 1983 No. 3-4 Bell
Telephone Magazine and additional AT&T Annual Reports.
March 12, 2007
The 1911 and 1913 AT&T Annual Reports have been added to the
AT&T Historical Financials.
Click here
to view the reports. Also, we now have the 1983 No. 2 issue of Bell
Telephone Magazine which has much information about the preparation for
divestiture of the Bell System and the new designated RBOC regions. Many
thanks to Jeff Charles for his allowing us to scan the original magazine and add
it to our digital archive. Jeff also provided the copy of the 1983 No.
3-4, which will be added once it has been scanned and converted to pdf.
The Bell Telephone Magazine sub-site has been updated to the new look and the
1983 No. 2 magazine is in its original colour format with pictures and all.
Click here to
see the new sub-site and magazine.
February 6, 2007
The 1908 and 1909 AT&T Annual Reports have been added to the
AT&T Historical Financials. Click
here
to view the reports.
January 30, 2007
After many months of having put aside scanning the AT&T
Annual Reports from 1907 onwards, the American Telephone & Telegraph Annual
Report for 1907 has been scanned and converted to pdf.
Click here
to view the report. A new and quicker method of scanning has been used and
will hopefully result in more reports and documents being uploaded.
December 2006
This month has been quite busy with preparing for the
continuing updates and modifications to the Bell System Memorial site.
With the new links and new pages and new documents that will be in the works
coming next year. Already we have had offers from people that want to help
contribute new materials to the Bell System memorial site, which we thank those
people very much for helping in expanding the research material here. The
contribution of materials either in electronic form or hard copy form is always
welcome and is in the tradition to the Porticus Mission to share and preserve
historical business documents.
On an interesting note. While researching information
on Mountain Bell (Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph), we came across
something unique about one of the Bell operating companies in the State of
Oregon and found a Bell company called Malheur Bell, which is odd since US West
eliminated the various Bell names in their territory in 1991, but this obscure
Bell company kept it's name and the Bell logo!
Click here for
information about Malheur Bell. Malheur Bell will be added on the US
West section of the Bell Operating companies.
Click here the Bell
Operating Companies Site.
Also, for those of you who visit this site that are cable or network
installers with your own business or work for a company doing this type of
work, you might be interested to know that the heritage of Western Electric
and the quality that they were known for is still alive and well through
SYSTIMAX® Solutions. This company
used to be a part of AT&T up until it was part of the Lucent spin-off in
1996. Lucent in turn spun-off AVAYA Communication in 2000 and then
AVAYA sold the SYSTIMAX® Solutions unit
to CommScope. To find out more about SYSTIMAX®
Solutions,
Click here.
The great thing is, after talking to the people at SYSTIMAX®,
it's great to know that most of their product is U.S. manufactured, not
cheap Chinese cabling or patch cords. The only place that sells
SYSTIMAX®, is Graybar Electric or
ANIXTER.
It's Official, AT&T received approval on December 29 to acquire Bell South.
Both the Cingular and Bell South name will be phased out in 2007.
Click here to
read further about the momentous event. With all the telecom mergers
in the U.S. recently, it makes one wonder what the point in the anti trust
suit of 1974-1982 was for and all the billions spent on
defending/prosecuting and the thousands of jobs lost.
September 2006
In September 2006, Bell System Memorial became a part of The
Porticus Centre, a non-profit entity that is dedicated to the preservation and
archiving of historical business documentation for select companies. An
overhaul of the original site that David Massey had put together is being planed
and new materials will also be added. The web site is now being hosted
by AT&T Web Hosting Services.
August 2006
This website has been basically dormant since late 2005.
The hosting contract with IPowerWeb.com will expire on September 14th if it is
not renewed.
Update: I have been in discussions with an interested
webmaster who would like to do whatever he can to keep the site alive when the
renewal comes up in September! Details will be posted later.
October 2005
Now for the latest addition to this website...some neat
photos of a solar powered motor built by a scientist in Sweden based on the
experiment shown in the Bell Labs Science Kit called "Energy from the Sun".
Click here for this latest addition
to my website.
October 11 - Added
Photos from Roy D. Welch
from the 1950's and 1960's era of Southwestern Bell.
October 30 - Added "End of the Line - The Rise and Fall of
AT&T" to my web page on
books about Ma Bell.
September 2005
With all the rumors going around about the new name for
SBC/AT&T once the merger is completed I was amazed at what I uncovered on the
Internet. Check out
this link!
August 2005
Added photos and scan of old National Geographic article on
Telstar. See the bottom of the
Telstar page
for these new additions and credits for the person who contributed this
material.
July 2005
Don Lively sent me two
new documents he authored to add to his existing documentation on this website.
He states, "Along with a few other old Bellheads, I've been pushing a little
group we call CARE (Citizens Against Regulatory Excesses). We intervene in
California regulatory activities which we believe run against the interests of
stakeholders in telecom." You can read these two new documents by clicking
on the following link:
TELCO STAKEHOLDERS
INFORMATION FORUM DOCUMENTS
March
19, 2005
My father passed away. It will be
several months before I'll be doing a lot of updates to this website.
My mom will be moving in with our family in a house we are having built
which may not be finished until end of December at the earliest. It will
be a challenge!
Prior to March 19, 2005
The web hosting company
I use for this website has increased the server space allocation for new
customers but won't do it for me unless I add on additional time to my contract
which I just renewed a few months ago. And when they do upgrade my account
they will wipe out all of my files! So this means that if I choose to do
this that this website will be down for who knows how long. I don't know
why they can't just increase the space like they have in the past without
starting over from scratch.
Anyway, if you visit this website in the near future and get
error messages instead then you will know most likely why. It takes
several hours to upload several hundred megabytes of files back to the web
server via my DSL line and that would only happen after they tell me they are
ready for me to reload my pages. Seems that they could do that for me from
their backup tapes they create every day.
If I do the upgrade it will give me space for some other
ideas I have and will have either a sub-domain or a second (and new) domain
sharing the server space. Stay tuned...
Added
Photos from
Chuck Warder & Larry Legge -nice black and white photos from the early
1900's of C&P telephone
Added to the
Miscellaneous
page:
"Rules for Troubleman" - a document from the year 1911 outlining the do's
and don'ts for the "telephone man" of long ago. Contributed by "Bill", a Service
Technician for Verizon / Bell Atlantic since 1978.
"Bell's Telephone"
article from page 277-288 of the December 1877 publication called
"The Manufacturer and Builder".
February 2005
My married daughter who has taken on
the main editorial responsibilities of the
Singing
Wires newsletter this year has also made a template for a new look
for this website of mine. And I like her ideas but finding the time
to implement them is another story! Over 135 web pages will have to
be modified and most likely split off into even more web pages (especially
the "Miscellaneous" web page with its numerous unrelated topics!)
Anyway, I'll be working on this idea of hers for some months to come but
have no idea when the new look will be ready for uploading to the
Internet. For starters, gone will be my dumb idea of the color
spectrum menu bar at the left. Hopefully I'll have this all
done by mid year :-)
January 2005
"Plan of Reorganization"
- Legal Document - Civil Action No. 82-0192, December 16, 1982. This
almost 500 page document was loaned to me to convert to electronic format by
Edward Inghrim. It details how AT&T proposed to accomplish the Bell System
divestiture by January 1, 1984.
I have not had time to proofread the electronic conversion results so there will
be some errors as you would expect from any Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
conversion of images of text to real text. Hopefully in the months to come
I'll have had time to proofread and correct the errors.
Added scan from the February 1953 "Radio and Television News"
magazine of a Bell Labs advertisement
boasting of the new 500 set. Also from that same magazine was an
ad for Raytheon's CK722 and CK721
transistors which were the first commercially available transistors for
hobbyists and general purpose use in new designs. These were on sale just under
five years after Bell Labs announced the transistor invention.
December 2004
Added a 1989 document to the
Bell System History page called "The
American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T)
by Sheldon Hochheiser of the AT&T Archives.
November 2004
The author of the book "The
Rape of Ma Bell - The
Criminal Wrecking of the Best
Telephone System in the World" gave permission for me to scan and convert
the paper copy of the book to electronic format (PDF file) and place on this
website.
The book was last printed back in 1988
but the material in the book is so important to understanding why we
have such a mess in the telecom world today - a direct result of the Bell
System divestiture in 1984 - that I wanted everyone to be able to
read its content. The news media won't tell you what went on behind
the scenes or the tremendous cost to the consumer nor will the government
admit what a mess they made for consumers, employees and the stockholders of
the once great AT&T and associated companies of the Bell System.
To go to the download page for the
book, please click
HERE.
Also this month I added photos of my
Western Electric 5320 model - a cross between the older 302 model but the
look of the 500. It was a transitional model for Western Electric
after World War II to use up the stockpile of 302 model parts while
introducing the model 500. Click
HERE to go to the page.
September 2004
This month marks the beginning of the
third year of the BellSystemMemorial.com domain name! Although
this website has existed as a "sub domain" on other domains for about 7
years, the growth in "hits" and the growth in site size accelerated
enormously after it got its own domain on the world wide web. During
last month the bandwidth exceeded 25 Gigabytes! Compare that with two
years ago when it only generated about 1 Gigabyte of bandwidth.
My hosting service IPowerWeb.com will
be upgrading my server space and bandwidth when my account is renewed. this
month. This means I can finally upload some files that there was no
room for in the past.
A bunch of articles from several Bell
Telephone Magazine were recently scanned and have been added to various
pages on this site where related topics are located. These new scans
are found on the following pages:
July 22, 2004
Added Bell
Atlantic / Diamond State Telephone
Genealogy Chart to the
Bell
Atlantic history web page. A big thank you to Jim Bowden for this
and other Bell Atlantic historical contributions to this website.
June 24, 2004 - Added photos of
Alexander Graham Bell to the
Bell System
History page.
June 23, 2004 - Additions made to
the Trading Post page and
Bell System Employee Stories page.
June 20, 2004 - Added new web page
with article titled
"What Killed Ma Bell?"
written in 1984 by Melvin D. Barger.
June 18, 2004 - Added photo to the
Western Electric model 2500 page of
Northern Electric 1500 telephone sent to me by website visitor in Canada.
June 18, 2004 - Added Western
Electric 3-slot payphone coin collection box photos and instructions for
opening and resetting the locking mechanism of the box to the
Western Electric 233G page.
June 5,
2004 - Added Brad Morrison's contribution of photos he took of a fully
restored Model A Ford, Bell System telephone truck at the old car show in
Iola, Wisconsin in 2002.
Click here to view
new page.
June 4,
2004 - Added scans to the
Bell System Logo
page of two 3M company advertisements from a 1982 magazine showing the
reflective 3M decals on Bell System vehicles.
May
28,
2004 - Added a
new page with some
photos and newspaper articles on the sabotage of AT&T Long Lines microwave
towers and other Long Lines facilities and equipment.
May
20,
2004 - Added
an article from the Southern Bell Magazine dated January,
1983 titled "Restructuring Plan - The Road Map to Divestiture". It gives
some historical insight into how the divestiture was to happen. To view the
article, go to the
AT&T Divestiture page.
May 9,
2004 - Added photo and story of
AT&T Long Lines Department TD-2 Microwave Radio Restoration Van to
AT&T Long Lines web page.
April 24, 2004 - Added
AT&T Long Lines web pages to this website.
The AT&T Long Lines book I scanned for
these new pages is now online but some proofreading is still in the works.
April 18, 2004 - Added photos I
took at Zoo Atlanta of the BellSouth sponsored Panda Bear exhibit to the
BellSouth page.
April 9, 2004 - Added photos of my
newly acquired 2N23 point-contact transistor to my
Bell Labs Transistor page.
April 3, 2004 - Added
TelecomPioneers information and AT&T Long Lines Retirees Mail List to the
Retirees web
page.
March 28, 2004 - Created a
new entry point for my website while still
retaining the old home page. It is hoped
this will give website visitors a faster way to locate the web pages most
likely to benefit them based on their interest or purpose for the visit.
March 19, 2004 - Added scan of
Western Electric stock certificate sent to me by Robert P Mohalley, CEO
Strategic Optical Systems, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia. It is located on the
Western Electric History page.
March 17, 2004 - Added "Bell System Recorded
Announcements" web page of call intercept recordings of Jane Barbe and
other famous voices that were used during the Bell System and even till
today.
March 14, 2004 - Added pictures to
the Bell Canada page (at bottom)
of some odds and ends sent to me by an ex-Bell Canada employee.
February 16, 2004 - Added a new
web page on
Bell Labs' Solar Battery
work and a brief history of photovoltaic technology with timeline. Added
Southern Bell pendant photo to "Odds
and Ends" page.
January 23, 2004 - Added
1922 Postcard showing Wisconsin
Telephone Company building in Racine, Wisconsin to the
Bell Operating Companies page.
Contributed by
Brad Morrison. Added Larry Bayern's contribution of scans he did of
Multi-button telephones to the
Western Electric
Telephones page.
January 2, 2004 - Corrected broken
link on About this Site page that pointed to a copy
of newspaper article. Added "Walking
Fingers" Bell System logo to the Home page and the Yellow Pages. Added
info on the Western Electric Telephones page
on how to wire a Princess model 702B that has a 5-conductor line cord so
that it will ring on today's private lines (when previously wired for
party-line service). Added
screen
shots to the the Western Electric Telephones
page of the Lucent ordering website for old Bell System Practices documents,
using the Princess phone as an example. New web page created -
References and Links on the Bell System.
December 27, 2003 - Added scans to
the Western Electric Telephones page of
Western Electric's "The Telephone Book" three-ring binder of marketing
material on the following products: Traditional Wall Phones (like the 2554
and 554) - Traditional Desk Phones (like the 2500 and 500 series) - Trimline
Phone - Princess Phone - Panel Telephone - Intercom Only Telephone -
Automatic Telephone - Mobile Telephone - Card Dialer Telephone - Touch-a-Matic
S Series Telephone - Touch-a-Matic 16 Telephone - Touch-a-Matic 32 Telephone
- Touch-a-Matic 32 Adjunct Telephone - Touch-a-Matic 12 Adjunct Dialer - The
TeleHelper Speakerphone.
December 24, 2003 - Added color
scans of Western Electric's "The Telephone Book" three-ring binder of
marketing material on Design Line telephones to the
Design Line Telephones web page.
December 23, 2003 - Added to the
DEW Line page a letter sent to the Lucent
archives by Robert F. Marfina concerning other military projects that
Western Electric was involved in for national defense. As a side note, in
the months ahead I hope to also add to the Western Electric Telephones page
some material Robert sent me and will be sending me from his days with
Western Electric.
December 18, 2003
- My web hosting service iPowerWeb.com has
increased my server space from 500 megabytes to 800 megabytes. That
means I can now start adding more Bell System archive material on my website
in the months ahead!
December 14, 2003 - Added "Major
Milestones in Transistor Electronics" to the
Bell Labs - Transistor page.
November 30, 2003 - Added "The
White Alice Network" PDF file to the
DEW Line Project page.
November 28, 2003 - Added color
slide photos and "The DEW Line Story" PDF file to the
DEW Line Project page.
November 6, 2003 - Split off
BellSouth,
Bell Atlantic (Verizon) from
the Regional Bell Operating Companies web page
into their own web pages and moved SBC material from the
Regional Bell Operating Companies web page
to the existing
SBC web page.
November 2, 2003 - Added a new
web page titled "The DEW Line Project". The DEW (Distant Early Warning) Line
Project was just one of the Bell System's involvement in the USA's defense
systems. On this page you will find some brief information and a gallery
of photos sent to this website by Ollie Ekstedt. Added photo to
Miscellaneous page. Added BSP
section of the amplified handsets to the
Handsets page. Added
additional text to
Life in the Bell System
page. Other minor changes made to website.
October 18, 2003 - Corrected an
HTML error caused by Micro$oft FrontPage when it created hyperlinks as
absolute instead of relative for the menu item "Visitors Comments".
This is one of those unpredictable things FrontPage does and they haven't
fixed the bug yet! Of course this is typical from a company that
pushes new software out the door before it's ready. Look how many
security patches Micro$oft had to come out with just for Windows XP so far!
But that's a subject for a different website :-)
October 13, 2003 - Added a "Comments Page" for those wishing to send
feedback about this website. Added "About
This Site" page to allow the home page to be more brief.
October 12, 2003 - Corrected a
previous addition to the Bell Labs experiment kits web pages "From Sun to
Sound" and "Energy from the Sun" where the Northern Electric
(Canadian) solar cell photos was placed on the "Energy from the Sun" web
page instead of the "From Sun to Sound web page.
October ?, 2003 - Added
BellSouth vehicle photos and descriptions - submitted by
Eric Paschal, BellSouth Network Services Regulatory Support.
October 7, 2003 - Added "Yellow
Pages for Telephone Parts and Repairs" (mirrored from my former sister website,
TelephoneTribute.com) to provide contact information for those trying to
locate parts or repairs for their antique telephones.
October 3, 2003 - Added
photo of a real Carterfone sent to me
by Stan Schreier. Added a page on the
CARDIAC learning aid by Bell Laboratories.
Added more old photographs;
these are of the Bell Laboratories facility in Murray Hill.
Added a
nice document called "UNDERSTANDING
THE NORTH AMERICAN NUMBERING PLAN" to the
Miscellaneous web page. It was sent to this website by its author, David
H. Bench.
Added scans of some really
old telephone bills sent to this
website.
Added two great articles by Don Hurter that have
disappeared from cyberspace until I located an archive containing them
(minus the photos). The two articles are linked from the
Miscellaneous page and are found
here and
here. I have been unable to contact
Don since the articles were written in 1995 and he left no forwarding
address.
August 2003 - 95% of
the changes mentioned below are now complete. For the next several
weeks I'll be checking for dead internal links and orphan files.
New web page added:
"Who really invented the Transistor".
Andrew
Emmerson
uncovers conflicting claims and some revisionist history
surrounding the transistor.
May -
August 2003 - MAJOR WEBSITE
CHANGES!
The ownership of my sister
website, TelephoneTribute.com
was transferred to a new owner and webmaster in May. Running two websites was just too much for me
to keep up with in my spare time so I put the other website up for
"adoption" to a good home! The new owners (volunteers!) consist of a
fellow telephone collector, Ron Christianson, and his webmaster, George Triant who jointly run the
Cyber
Telephone Museum.
What this means for
the Bell System Memorial website is the relocation of the Western Electric
and other Bell System related files from the TelephoneTribute.com domain to
this domain. The files have already been removed from the other
website but will take a few weeks for me to incorporate them into this
website so please be patient. By the end of August I should have the
Western Electric telephone schematics, photos, posters etc. up and running.
April 2003 -
Added copy of
"Our Living Past - A Strategic Asset" an
AT&T's FOCUS magazine article, January 26, 1988 to the
Miscellaneous web page. Added
copy of article from the February 1993
issue of AT&T's FOCUS magazine on the VideoPhone model 2500 to the
Picture Phone page.
March 2003 -
Added copy of the US patent for the discovery of the transistor effect to
the Bell Labs Transistor page.
Added the Trading Post web page to assist
those trying to locate Bell System related items or to sell/trade Bell
System items. Added maps and more detailed descriptions to the
Bell Operating Companies page.
February 2003 -
Added some great reading material by Don Lively which exposes how the
government managed to ruin the telecommunications industry in 1982 and again
in 1996! Check out the three documents submitted to this website by
Don by clicking HERE. Thanks Don for
your contribution to this website!
January
2003 - IPowerWeb, my domain hosting services
company, has allocated more space for my web sites. I now have more
files available on the Internet than were available last year. Changes
were made accordingly to the pages that were affected by this availability
of additional files. Scanned the entire 100 page book that came with
the Bell Labs Experiment #2 kit on solar energy and made it available in PDF
file format.
June thru November
2002 -
Massive changes in web servers, domain names and
file locations dominated this time period. Technical problems are
still being worked out. An additional domain (www.BellSystemMemorial.com)
and server hosting account were applied for on September 14th to help
resolve some of the problems with space limitations. Some new
additions to this website, but these additions were overshadowed by the
aforementioned challenges.
May
2002 -
Added full-color brochure called "The
Bell System's Line of New Products and Services" to the
Western Electric Products page.
April
2002 -
Added two PDF files to the
Miscellaneous page -
Aging Problems
of Plastics and Automatic Intercept
Service, both from an old Bell Laboratories Record magazine.
March
2002 -
Added information for Bell Telephone retirees on an
organization called Association of BellTel Retirees, Inc. to the
Bell System Employee Stories page. Updated logos
on the RBOC Table of Changes. Added
scans from vintage postcards of the Eastland Disaster to the
Eastland Disaster web page. Created new page for
The Transistor and added photos and
text from Bell Labs website to the new page.
February 2002 -
Added
divestiture
costs information to
AT&T Divestiture
page in response to an inquiry by a Yale student. Added article on the
CARDIAC kit to the
Bell Labs Kits page. Added a link to a
special 60-page Bell Labs e-publication
on the Picturephone to the
Picturephone web page.
January 2002 -
Added Ricardo Delacuesta's
personal story to the Bell System Employee Stories
web page. Added a separate page for
Western
Electric's Design Line phones.
December 2001 -
Added more Bell System photos,
scanned by and contributed to this web site by Ross Hamilton of Canada.
Added hyperlink on the home page to a text file of
the possible explanations for how the phrase, "Ma Bell" came about.
Added information on the creator of the Bell logo and the new (1984)
AT&T logo to the Bell Logo History page.
Added "Breaking Up is Hard on You" song to "The
Day the Bell System Died" web page. Early
technical history of Touch-Tone dialing document link added to
Bell Labs
page.
November 2001 -
Added new book review on my web page, "The
Rape of Ma Bell", called "A Voice in the Wilderness". Added new
information on the Bell Labs science kits
thanks to the input from a visitor to my web site. Added news-breaking
story on my Bell Labs web page from the Bell
Labs website about a transistor consisting of one single molecule!
Added three more Bell System advertisements to the
Bell System Ads web page.
There were other changes as well but not
of huge significance compared to the ones above.
October 2001 -
Added photos of Bell System kettle, burner, and teapot to the "Odds
and Ends" page. Added "AT&T
equipment survived trade center collapse" to the
"Miscellaneous" page.
September 2001 -
Added links to
Bell
Canada page and removed outdated material of the Bell Canada corporate
family tree on that page. A big thanks to Emily Purchase (Administrative
Assistant, Mayor's Office,
City of
Brantford "The Telephone City") for sending me this information!
June 2001 - Added
Telstar
article to the Bell Labs page.
Changed my email contact address due
to recent spamming problems. Added Western Electric radio transmitter ads to my
Western
Electric Products page.
May 2001 - Added photo of Verizon van to the
Bell
Operating Companies web page, courtesy of Bill Cook. Added
Southern Bell's new rates for July 4, 1983 to
Bell
System Property page. Removed "Multimedia" page (files
linked from that page are now on a separate disc). Created new page for
future use called "Miscellaneous".
April 2001 - Corrected
paragraph on Multimedia
page. Added Bell logo animation to home page. Added "Timeline
of the Legal History of Telecommunications
and the Divestiture of AT&T" to the
AT&T
Divestiture page. Added side notes to bottom of "The
Decision to Divest" page. Added photo of Western Electric fan
to Western Electric Products page.
Added two modern-day AT&T commercials to the
Bell System advertisements
page. Added Frank Bennett's scanned images.
Corrected bad links and eliminated unwanted orphan files. Added photo collection
of Sandra Mears' Speech Synthesis kit to the
Speech
Synthesis Kit page. Corrected errors (word "modem"
replaced with correct word "modern" - an error created by the optical
character/word recognition software confusing "r" next to
"n" and thinking it is an "m") in the documents
Western
Electric and the Bell System (Word DOC) and the
text
version.
March 2001 - Corrected some
HTML errors on the following pages:
Eastland Disaster,
Western Electric Products,
Odds
and Ends of the Bell System. Added photos sent to me by Edward
Kelly to the Historical Photos page.
Reorganized and added new material to the
Bell
System Advertisements page. Added cartoons to three web pages.
February 2001 - Added
"Bell Laboratories Record - 25 years of Transistors - December 1972"
booklet in PDF file format (see
Bell
Labs web page). Added "Century One - A Prologue" (PDF
file format) to the
Western Electric
History page. Added copy of instruction sheet that came with the G6
handset on the Western
Electric Telephones page.
December 2000 - Added
Bell
Labs Science Experiment Kits photos (detailed descriptions of each kit
will be added in a future update). Revised
Western
Electric Products page. Minor
modifications to html code in menu to correct a glitch in the Internet search
engine display of results.
November 2000 - Removed Bell
logos on page headers and other locations. Moved web pages to same server
as Tribute to the Telephone. No longer associated with BellSystem.com.
Changes site name to A Memorial to the Bell System. New menu structure.
October 2000 - Added "Bell
System Links" page. Reworded index (home) page. Added new story
"Life in the Bell System".
Added table showing changes of the Baby Bells
since 1983. Added two more photos to the
Picturephone
page. Added "Transmitter Tests" picture to the
Western
Electric page. Added page called
The
Decision to Divest: Incredible or Inevitable?
By Trudy E. Bell, Senior Associate Editor - Reprinted
from
IEEE Spectrum
Online. Added Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western
Electric by Adams, Stephen B. and Orville R. Butler to the
Western
Electric History page.
September 2000 - Added
AT&T "American Bell" logo and more
Bell
System advertisements plus two "Reach Out" multimedia files to the
Bell System advertisements page. Added a
picture of BellSouth building in Birmingham, Alabama, USA along with some
updates on "what happened to all the Baby Bells since 1983?" on the RBOC
page which was contributed by a web site visitor. Added a multimedia
MPEG file on the Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
page.
August 19, 2000 - Added
AT&T Long Lines logo to the
Bell Logos page.
July 22, 2000 - Started the groundwork for a
web page on Bell Labs.
Also, check out my new page with
old photos from a
local Bell Operating Company.
June 23, 2000 - Added an old
Readers Digest article on the
Western
Electric history page called "Mama Visits the Factory". Also
added a new page called "Historical Photos of Bell
System Equipment and People". Added new advertisement "His genius
gave wings to words" on the
Bell System Ads
page.
June 13, 2000 - Added a page
on the Western Electric "Mirrophone"
(not "microphone"!). Read about this rare find!
June 4, 2000 - Added a page
on what is was like to work for the Bell System as
told by former employees.
May 6, 2000 - Added 20 new
Bell System advertisements to the
Bell System Ads
page.
March 30,
2000 - Added info to the
WEco Telephones page
on the Western Electric Design Line telephones that were made available to
consumers in the 1970's.
March 8, 2000 -
Added more photos of my telephone collection to the
WEco Telephones page.
January 30, 2000 -
Added new Bell System Advertisement scans to the
Bell
System Ads page. Added new scan of a photo from Photonics magazine of
the Picturephone to the Picturephone page.
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