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Comment by hylaride | Hacker News Reader

Did you even read the article?

Nortel built a lot of cellular networks and owned a huge chunk if IP for it (that was surprisingly valuable during the bankruptcy auctions). They also had quite the large long-haul fiber optic install base (which they bet the farm on, that quickly became commodified, which is really what bankrupted them). They also had one of the first commercially available DSL modems.

Sure, they built “bad” edge routers and switches (they came out of the telco industry, so focused too much on managed services for them, which caused headaches for end-customers), but the company was an engineering powerhouse ruined by hubristic businessmen.

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Please do not insinuate or ask if someone read the article. You may not have noticed that this is against the rules.

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh, I read it. I also lived with Nortel gear during this timeframe. They were not great at much of anything. They were more often the only game in town, and they knew it. Canadian schools and government agencies bought their gear because it was canadian not because it was any good. Those touchscreen tablet controller things? Does anyone remember how bad touchscreens were in those days? Give me a blackberry with a mechanical keyboard.

>> In 1999 the co-founder of Corel Corp., who’d gotten his start at Nortel’s precursor company, threw a gala at which his wife showed up in a C$1 million leather bodysuit with an anatomically correct gold breastplate and a 15-carat-diamond nipple.

That was the attitude of people running nortel at the time. Some consider it the canadian enron: the unicorn that ate itself.

Most of that gear was likely bay networks kit, which was actually acquired by Nortel. I don’t disagree that it was crap, but it was cheaper than Cisco.

I grew up in the Ottawa area in the 1990s and my parents were in the tech scene there; the Copelands were rich and eccentric (and odd), but that’s no different than Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or Steve Jobs.

My point isn’t that Nortel didn’t put out shit products, every large successful company has. It’s that Nortel was more than a crappy router company.

The Bay Network switches were pretty good, actually. Well, not so much the Centillion...but the Baystacks were ok. It was the routers that they got from Wellfleet through the Bay acquisition that were wildly out of date with the worst management software ever written (Site Manager). They were still trying to push BCN/ARNs after everyone else (least of all Cisco) had introduced 3-4 new generations. And Site Manager was awful...seriously.

Err...eccentric and odd mean the same thing.

That fancy attire really doesn't look that great : http://www.geocities.ws/cityofottawainfo/celeb_m.htm

Proof that you can't buy taste. For everything else, obviously there's Mastercard.

And the cost shows how they wasted money. Leather bodysuits are not 1,000,000$ in any currency. And that couldn't possibly have been solid gold. It would be too soft. They paid 1,000,000$ for an off-the-rack fetish outfit and some a gold-plated hand-hammered steel sheet. A live-in designer? Nobody since 18th century royalty has needed a live-in fashion designer.

To be fair, it was almost certainly the diamonds that brought the price to $1m. But in the words of David Lee Roth “who am I to get in the way of a good rumor”.

That link takes me to a spammy gaming site.

Interesting link to read.

I used to do the Xmas cards bulk mail for Canadian celebrities for several charities in the 80s. The 9-track tape(!) had stage names and real names for about 5,000 celebs, so that was interesting to peruse.

The outfit in question appears to be this: https://capitalcurrent.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Million...

Spoiler: not exactly in good taste, but rather less outrageous than you might think.

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