X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Bell System


Agner Krarup Erlang

He was a member of the Danish Mathematicians' Association (TBMI) and through this met amateur mathematician Johan Jensen, the Chief Engineer of the Copenhagen Telephone Company (KTAS in Danish), an offshoot of the International Bell Telephone Company.

American Bell

American Bell refers to two entities that were associated with the Bell System.

Bell System

Agere Systems, incorporated on August 1, 2000, the former Micro Electronics subsidiary of Lucent was then spun off in 2002 and acquired by LSI in 2007

Neo-Marxian economics

Competition is generally limited however with a few large capital formations sharing various markets, with the exception of a few actual monopolies (such as the Bell System at the time).


Customer-premises equipment

Under the Bell System monopoly in the United States (post Communications Act of 1934), the Bell System owned the phones, and one could not attach one's own devices to the network, or even attach anything to the phones.

FCC Computer Inquiries

The building blocks would be divided by the BOCs as follows: Basic Service Elements, Basic Serving Arrangements, Complimentary Network Services, and Ancillary Network Services.

SS Exochorda

Noted industrial decorator Henry Dreyfuss, whose many designs included the "Twentieth Century Limited" locomotive (1938) for the New York Central Railroad, and the "500" desk telephone (1949), the Bell System standard for 45 years, designed the interiors.

Telephone company

Comedian Lily Tomlin frequently satirized the telephone industry (and the country's then-dominant Bell System in particular) with a skit playing the telephone operator Ernestine.

Twistor memory

In the United States the Bell System (American Telephone & Telegraph) also used twistors with permanent magnets as the "Program Store" or main memory in their first electronic telephone switching system, the 1ESS as well as others in the ESS series of electronic telephone switches, and did so up to the 4ESS switch introduced in 1976 and sold into the 1980s.


see also

Common carrier

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 made extensive revisions to the "Title II" provisions regarding common carriers and repealed the judicial 1982 AT&T consent decree (often referred to as the "modification of final judgment" or "MFJ") that effectuated the breakup of AT&T's Bell System.

Syracuse Telephonic Exchange

In 1997, the Bell system consolidated again into five companies and NYNEX became part of the Bell Atlantic system which eventually merged into Verizon.