So much of what we have today is due in some part to what ATT created. I'd say they're very much an example of what people imagine when they think of a well run company. Anti trust concerns aside, what they created was incredibly reliable, at a time when few would have blamed it if it hadn't been. Old switching stations would take up entire buildings, when by the 80s and 90s it could be reduced to a single rack or less. The microwave tower system had requirements to have multiple backup generators available in case of power loss, and had to be built to withstand a blast (some distance away).

And of course bell labs created a number of incredibly important technologies. This isn't as easy as just throwing money at the wall, someone had to be in charge of talent selection and what projects to invest in, but when you review what they were able to accomplish, it can really make you wonder what other labs were/are doing.

>Between 1960 and 1973, NASA spent almost $26 billion on the Apollo Program ($311 billion in 2024 dollars), over 2% of U.S. GDP. Over that same period, AT&T spent almost $70 billion building new telephone infrastructure

What a crazy statistic to pull, and the chart in the article also adds to it.