AT&T Computer Systems - Divestiture

Divestiture

After divestiture, January 1, 1984, American Telephone & Telegraph was required to put its computer business into a fully separated subsidiary called AT&T Information Systems (ATTIS, without the ampersand or hyphen). Software was developed in New Jersey locations (Murray Hill, Summit, Holmdel, and Piscataway), and software, hardware, and system solutions were developed in Naperville and Lisle, IL. After a couple years of court hearings, AT&T was allowed to pull the business back into the mainstream corporate organization, and it was renamed AT&T Data Systems Group, consisting of 3 divisions: Computer, Terminals (the Teletype Corporation of Skokie, IL), and Printers. In 1991, the AT&T Data Systems Group, with the three divisions was announced to the public. In 1992 the Terminals division (Teletype Corporation) was sold to Memorex-Telex, and the Printer division, which had only bought OEM equipment from Genicom, was phased out. By the mid-1990s, this left only AT&T Computer Systems.

AT&T Computer Systems (abbreviated AT&T-CS) was the home of the UNIX System V operating system, originally developed in the Bell Labs Research Division. The important System V Interface Definition (SVID) was written, attempting to standardize the various flavors of Unix, and define the official interfaces which made up a UNIX operating system. In 1988, AT&T announced its intent to buy up to a 20% stake in Sun Microsystems, a company then most well known for making high-end UNIX workstations. Upset at their academic-minded supplier (Bell Labs) now turned competitor (AT&T-CS), the "Gang of Seven" founded the Open Software Foundation (OSF), each contributing source code from their UNIX SVR3 versions. AT&T founded the UNIX International organization as a counter-response to the OSF. But by the late 1980s, AT&T had almost given up, sold most of its stake in Sun Microsystems, spun the UNIX business off as Unix System Laboratories (which was later bought by Novell), canceled its WE 32000 (aka BELLMAC) and CRISP (C Reduced Instruction Set Processor) microprocessor product lines, and just concentrated on networked server computer systems. See also Unix wars.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, AT&T-CS produced many "firsts" in the computer world, besides the UNIX operating system itself. The 3B5 (1981) and 3B15 (1982) were the first computers to be designed with the 32-bit WE 32000 microprocessor, and the 3B15 was the first computer to run a demand-paging version of Unix. There was a project, codenamed "Alice", to develop the 3B5 into an asymmetric multiprocessor with 3 CPUs, but this was canceled in favor of the demand paging 3B15 project, and a few of the "Alice" participants left the company and went to Sequent Computer Systems.

The 3B5, 3B15, and 3B20S and 3B20D were aimed at the former AT&T subsidiaries the RBOCs. However, starting with the ATT-IS days, development of a commercial version of this hardware commenced. The product line was started in 1982, with the introduction of the UNIX PC (aka the 3B1), based on a Motorola 68010 processor. This product was not a success, in part due to the high margin on the machines, AT&T sold the machine for $8,000 although their cost was approximately $4,000.

The next product was the 3B2 product line. It ranged from a 3B2/200 (desktop) unit, to a 3B2/1000, (data center sized), these machines were sold with System V Release 2, and later System V Release 3. The 3B2 was the reference platform for SVR3.