It’s funny to think of a time when the Internet was not the primary focus of the telecommunications world. It used to be…about telephones, funnily enough! Fascinated by it as I am, this isn’t my area of expertise, but one thing I am experienced in is old websites, and an untouched, 90s-era website still live on the Web is a unicorn that deserves special attention. That’s where we find ourselves with Bell.com, an official memorial for the Bell System as it existed for a hundred years and a history of the Bell Symbol with what weight it continued to carry in the 90s.
AT&T, originally a holding company for Alexander Graham Bell’s phone patents, effectively controlled the entirety of the US telephone system throughout the 20th century. Realizing AT&T’s power and bully tactics, as early as the late 40s, the US Government looked to break the party up, and finally succeeded in 1982. The Bell System would become defunct, and AT&T would be split into “Baby Bells”, or officially Regional Bell Operating Companies, all across the US: Ameritech, BellSouth, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and US West. (Cincinnati Bell and Southern New England Telephone, while often grouped with the RBOCs and involved in Bell.com, were independent entities AT&T only owned minority investments in and thus aren’t actually RBOCs.)
Bell.com is brought to you by five of those: Ameritech, BellSouth, Southwestern Bell (who’d since acquired Pacific Telesis and become SBC Communications), plus Verizon, the successor to Bell Atlantic, and Qwest, successor to US West. Where it gets fascinating is that, due to its age (I can’t find a date later than 1999 on it), Bell.com has itself become a product of history. Since then, SBC has acquired SNET, Ameritech, BellSouth, and the AT&T name and corporation itself, putting four of the RBOCs under the same banner once more. Between this new AT&T, Verizon (the product of Bell Atlantic buying NYNEX), and Lumen (aka CenturyLink, who took over Qwest and thus US West), three companies now control the entirety of Bell’s old operating area, none of whom actively use the Bell name any longer.
To get back to the site itself, “i hit the servers limit so” in our Discord (who never did get back to me if they have actually hit the server limit) spotted this one as being frozen in time, leading to the rare “restoration” that actually involves a live site. Anyone who uses Protoweb will be aware that we usually do passthroughs of live sites, but for sites like this that aren’t actively updated, it’s actually better if we just grab the entire site and mirror it to Protoweb, safe and sound. You can’t pass up the slam dunks when they appear–doubly so if they have a Flash game about phone trivia attached. Enjoy, Protoweb!
