s and
researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace. These are the
veterans, the most developed group, the richest, the most respectable,
in most ways the most powerful. Whole generations have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he founded
survives; people work for the phone system today whose
great-grandparents worked for the phone system. Its specialty
magazines, such as Telephony, AT&T Technical Journal, Telephone
Engineer and Management, are decades old; they make computer
publications like Macworld and PC Week look like amateur
johnny-come-latelies.

And the phone companies take no back seat in high-technology, either.
Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets; but
the researchers of Bell Labs have won SEVEN NOBEL PRIZES. One potent
device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has created entire
GROUPS of industries. Bell Labs are world-famous for generating "a
patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in astronomy,
physics and cosmology.

Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much a
company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divestiture of the
1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. The
AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile,"
a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny
helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell
System employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were
nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public service. There
was good money in Bell, but Bell was not ABOUT money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering. People went into the Bell
System for a good life, and they had a good life. But it was not mere
money that led Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes
to fight with toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull
the red-eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems. The
Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither
rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers.

It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical about
any political or social system; but cynicism does not change the fact
that thousands of people took these ideals very seriously. An