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Comment by bimguy | Hacker News Reader

Being Australian, I don't know much about the company other then it's a popular telecom provider in North America so it's interesting to see that they had their hands in workstations at some point.

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AT&T invented, among other things, transistors, lasers, photovoltaic cells, CCDs, information theory, radio astronomy, C, and Unix.

C++ too, right? Unless Bell Labs was spun out of AT&T before that. Stroustrup started C++ at Bell Labs as C with Classes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B

We are only mentioned the good things they did. ;-)

S and thus R came out of there too.

AT&T was the renamed Bell Telephone, responsible for the invention of huge swaths of technology. You can look at old PDFs of the Bell System Technical Journal, published 1922 to 1983. Bell was also the birthplace of Unix.

And then some:

”Researchers from there are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

AT&T was the telephone monopoly in the US until the government broke it up into 9 regional companies in the 70s. These companies have since re-merged into 3 companies: AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies. Lumen is the only one that isn't in the cell phone business. It used to be called CenturyLink until very recently.

Unix and C were invented at AT&T's Bell Labs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...

In fact, AT&T agreed not to enter the computer market in return for being allowed to maintain a monopoly. They agreed to the 1984 breakup only in return for being allowed to make computers - a decision which did not go well, since their computer line was never very successful.

In terms of strategy it's not a bad move though, after all the computer (and by extension the smartphone) did become the new telephone. Pretty much all phones even run an OS with Unix-like underpinnings.

They just failed to capitalise on it but it was a pretty good vision IMO.

Which was also when the lawsuit against BSD came to be, and the attempt to forbid the Lion's Books to keep being printed.

Which only goes to show what have happened to UNIX outside Bell Labs if it was a commercial product from day 1.

In 1995 I was an intern at Indosat, a telephone company in Indonesia. Indosat bought billing system from ATT and also some PCs from them (maybe the PCs were part of the deal). That is how I experienced the speed of a Pentium PC for the first time.

The machine itself was made by Convergent Technologies. It's similar to the MiniFrame - and possibly also the MightyFrame.

AT&T rebranded it, and there were two versions: the 7300 can take a single half-height MFM drive, and the 3B1 can take two half-height MFM drives or a single full-height. The 3B1 has a different plastic case with a square-ish 'bump' under the monitor, and usually a modified (called a P5.1) motherboard.

They top out at 4MB RAM (2MB on the motherboard and 2MB on expansion cards). Disk storage would have topped out at 190MB with a single Maxtor XT-2190 full-height, or a pair of Miniscribe 3650s for 2x50 = 100MB.

While I have heard about the 3B1 for years, even if AT&T is an unknown foreign company in my part of the world, I'd never heard of the MiniFrame. Thanks for this.

http://cholla.mmto.org/computers/miniframe/index.html

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/sec/2963/Convergent-Tech...

The original brochure for the MiniFrame Plus:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_convergentmePlusProduc...

A blog about its big brother the MightyFrame, with pics:

http://mightyframe.blogspot.com/

Like pretty much everything Convergent did, it was ahead of its time. Some really brilliant people must have worked there. Too bad so few people has hear about them (or used their stuff).

The telltale sign of late Convergent is the keycaps, also present in many Burroughs and Unisys desktops and terminals.

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