The Bell System was the system of companies, led by the American Bell Telephone Company and subsequently by AT&T, which provided telephone services to much of the United States and Canada from 1877 to 1984, at various times as a monopoly. In 1984, the system was broken up into independent companies by a U.S. Justice Department mandate.
The colloquial term Ma Bell (as in "Mother Bell") was often used by the general public in the United States to refer to any aspect of this conglomerate, as it held a near complete monopoly over all telephone service in most areas of the country, and is still used by many to refer to any telephone company. Ma Bell is also used to refer to the various female voices behind recordings for the Bell System: Mary Moore, Jane Barbe, and Pat Fleet (the current voice of AT&T).
Read more about Bell System: History, Present-day Usage of The Bell Name, Subsidiaries, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words bell and/or system:
“I was thinking of a son.
The womb is not a clock
nor a bell tolling,
but in the eleventh month of its life
I feel the November
of the body as well as of the calendar.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Our system of government, in spite of Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, Watergate, is still the best system of government on earth. And the greatest resource of all are the 215 million Americans who still have within us the strength, the character, the intelligence, the experience, the patriotism, the idealism, the compassion, the sense of brotherhood on which we can rely in the future to restore the greatness to our country.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)