[COFF] Re: Bell System and the Video Game Industry?

[Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org>]

steve jenkin <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au> writes:

>> On 4 Jul 2023, at 11:57, segaloco via COFF <coff@tuhs.org> wrote:
>> 
>> So this evening I've been tinkering with a WECo 2500 I've been using for playing with telecom stuff, admiring the quality of the DTMF module, and it got me thinking, gee, this same craftsmanship would make for some very nice arcade buttons, which then further had me pondering on the breadth of the Bell System's capabilities and the unique needs of the video game industry in the early 80s.
>> 
>> In many respects, the combination of Western Electric and Bell Laboratories could've been a hotbed of video game console and software development, what with WECo's capability to produce hardware such as coin slots, buttons, wiring harnesses for all sorts of equipment, etc. and then of course the software prowess of the Labs.
>> 
>> Was there to anyone here's knowledge any serious consideration of this market by Bell?  The famous story of UNIX's origins includes Space Travel, and from the very first manual, games of various kinds have accompanied UNIX wherever it goes.  It seems that out of most companies, the Bell System would've been very well poised, what with their own CPU architecture and other fab operations, manufacturing and distribution chains, and so on.  There's a looooot of R&D that companies such as Atari and Nintendo had to engage in that the Bell System had years if not decades of expertise in.  Would anti-trust stuff have come into play in that regard?  Bell couldn't compete in the computer market, and I suppose it would depend on the legal definitions applicable to video game hardware and software at the time.
>> 
>> In any case, undercurrent here is the 2500 is a fine telephone, if the same minds behind some of this WECo hardware had gone into video gaming, I wonder how different things would've turned out.
>> 
>> - Matt G.
>
> Matt,
>
> An astute question and one that, IMHO, deserves an answer because, if you’re asking, you never saw AT&T operate as a full throated monopoly.
> A caveat, I wasn’t ever at Bell Labs, didn’t work in the USA but have talked to folk.
>
> The short answer would be “Suits and Lawyers”.

[None of the following really answers the original question, but may be
interesting anyway]

So...  I wasn't there for the earlier times, certainly not the monopoly
days, but I was there later and (in my opinion) until Lucent more or
less fell apart (and maybe after that), AT&T and all of the companies it
spawned still acted like a monopoly in a lot of ways (and I include the
Baby Bells in that).

Yes, it was often about "Suits and Lawyers"...

[snip]

> That management & legal stance of ‘protecting’ all I.P. it could claim and trying to charge as much as it could,
> how did it work out for them?

That persisted until I left in the early 2000s.

I had a account rep say that they had no idea how much anything costed
because each customer was charged something different.  More or less it
came down to "Charge the customer as much as you can get away with".  As
a developer, we certainly didn't have any idea for what a end customer
was paying.

Maybe an interesting side story....  I was sold as a Value Added Service
once for $40,000 to a end customer.  I went on site to two different
locations that the customer had, and performed about 8 hours of work all
told spread out over two days.  The sales person who sold this VAS to
the customer was very worried that the customer would be unhappy if I
didn't spend a week on the effort...  personally I just wanted to get
the work done and get home, and I knew that the customer would be happy
with it taking only two days...

[snip]

> In 1994, AT&T sold off their Computers (to NCR) and Software (Unix) to Novel, who’d already paid for some of it.

I was there more or less for the NCR thing....  what I remember is that
it was bought to get access to a computer platform outright.  NCR was
renamed GIS and later spun back out of AT&T as NCR again (if I remember
it all correctly).  My group was forced to port our application platform
to GIS even though we wanted to move to HP instead.  When GIS didn't pan
out for us (in the end) we ended up on HP anyway.

[snip]

> AT&T management in the 1960’s & 70’s thought they could ‘milk’ Unix and new IC-based computers in the same way
> they’d milked the telephone business since Alexander Graham Bell invented a working telephone circa 1875.

The management thought that they could milk EVERYTHING.  The product I
worked on was ported and ported and ported starting with a VAX running
SVR3 (or maybe something earlier) to an HP (when I left)...  I suppose
it makes some sense, as it made money as it was, but it was really hard
to innovate.  I managed to do it a couple of times, but my efforts were
really rare.  The product I worked on was pure software doing traffic
management on a classic circuit switched phone network.  But, as best as
I can tell, products like the 5ESS did the same thing.  As I remember
it, the 5ESS-2000 was the 5E software running on a couple of Sun sparcs
in a emulator.  Some of the assembly happened at 6200 Broad St. and I
got to observe some of it while walking around the factory floor after
lunch.  I recall two sparc servers hooked together with an internal
Ethernet switch.  Slap all of that in a 5E cabinet and you were good to
go.

Part of this stagnate nature was the demand of the customer base in the
US, for the product I worked on, at least...  they did tend to demand
that nearly NOTHING change about the product at all (at least at the
time).

> Their mismanagement killed the business, causing Bell Labs as we knew it, to eventually fade away.

I agree pretty much with that, but probably have somewhat different
reasoning as to the why.  I see it more as the management had little
idea as to what they had a lot of the time.  I worked with a guy who had
been there a lot longer then I had... something like 20 years when I
started... and I don't think he had ever worked on a product in the 20
years UNTIL he arrived on ours that ever actually went to market and if
it did ever lasted any great length of time.  A lot of the stuff he
worked on was pretty neat, but was either in the wrong place at the
wrong time, or was mismarketed or honestly was just silly (i.e. some
product to stroke the ego of someone in management).

[snip]

> all my best
> steve
>
> --
> Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
> PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
>
> mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org