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

steve jenkin <sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au> writes: [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 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] 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] 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). 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] -- Brad Spencer - brad(a)anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org