AT&T
More info
- Released
- 1885
- Type
- Telecom company
- Headquarters
- Dallas, Texas
The American telephone monopoly that owned Bell Labs, gave the world Unix almost by accident and was broken up in 1984.
American Telephone and Telegraph was set up in 1885 to run Bell's long-distance network and grew into the Bell System: long distance, the local operators, the manufacturer Western Electric and the research at Bell Labs. A 1956 consent decree barred it from selling computers, so when Unix turned up in the lab it was licensed cheaply to universities. That, more than anything, is why Unix spread at all.
The antitrust case ended in 1984 with the local companies split off into seven regional "Baby Bells". Freed from the ban, AT&T tried to turn Unix into a product — System V — which mostly produced the Unix wars; Unix System Laboratories went to Novell in 1993. The punchline came in 2005, when Baby Bell SBC bought its former parent and took the name.