A study was conducted to determine the balance between the advantages and disadvantages of caller-ID from a user perspective. A questionnaire exploring the degree of concern raised by a range of events was completed by 43 US postgraduate students. It was found that caller-ID was of much greater...

Bell Labs is a costly development house, and the products designed and developed there do not appear competitive in price and features. Since divestiture it is no longer fair that AT&T foot most of the research bill for the US telecommunications industry as a whole. Everyone concerned would...

There is worldwide interest in the prospect for information access in the home using the television receiver for display of textual and graphical information. Viewdata systems use a large, central, computerized databank utility to store the information. Teletext systems transmit all the...

A Picturephone® two way visual communications system was operational from March 1973 to April 1976 at the Bethany-Garfield Hospital in Chicago, and achieved metered usage as high as 1800 calls per month. To assist the AT&T Marketing Department in its visual communications market exploration...

Picturephone service -- a two-way, switched, video telephone system -- was developed and marketed by AT&T in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The market did not respond to the service offering, and the service was withdrawn -- in other words, picturephone service was a market failure, although...

Divestiture of the US Bell System in 1984 caused concern about the future of research and development activities conducted at Bell Labs. This article 4describes the history of R&D in the Bell System, and in the organizations which have been formed since divestiture, and looks at likely future...

Within the last few years videotex has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, but as frequently is the case with novel services that are still evolving, a precise definition of videotex is somewhat difficult to obtain. To some people the term videotex applies to a wide variety of...

The Bell Labs of decades ago was well recognized as a national treasure for its pioneering innovations and its creation of new knowledge. However, the breakup of the Bell System that occurred in 1984 resulted in considerable change for research and development in telecommunication. This paper...

The growths in capacity of various generations of transmission technology were studied. The results show that the growth rates for different transmission technologies are themselves increasing, which means that the pace of transmission technology is accelerating. What is somewhat surprising is...

This issue of the journal Prometheus includes an edited collection of papers by communication and media scholars from around the globe treating the social and societal aspects of the use of telecommunication and mass media tied to the tragic events that occurred in the United States on September...