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:
“The one who should remove the bell is the one who hung it up.”
—Chinese proverb.
“If mothers are to be successful in achieving their child-rearing goals, they must have the inner freedom to find their own value system and within that system to find what is acceptable to them and what is not. This means leaving behind the anxiety, but also the security, of simplistic good-bad formulations and deciding for themselves what they want to teach their children.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)