Bell Laboratories history

Bell Laboratories was founded in 1974 in Madison, Wisconsin, by Malcolm Stack, an entrepreneur who started the company with one product - Rodent Cake.

In 1978 two more Bell researchers, Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.

The dominance of Bell Labs faded after 1984, when the courts found that AT&T was a monopoly and mandated that the company divest itself of its local telephone operations.

In 1985 Bell Labs developed an innovative speech processing system, Conversant Systems, that AT&T formed into a new venture.

In 1986 the research facility assisted Illinois Bell and its parent company in designing and deploying a highly innovative ISDN network that incorporates video, voice, and data signals over the same path of transmission.

By 1989 UNIX was the standard operating system in almost all computers purchased within the United States.

In 1994 a scientific experiment conducted at Bell Labs resulted in the transmission of 40 billion bits of data per second over one optical fiber.

In September 1995, AT&T announced its break up into three separate companies: communications equipment and technology, computer, and communications services.

In 1996, the remaining AT&T split again, spinning off its manufacturing operations as Lucent Technologies.

In 2007, a year after the merger of Lucent Technologies and Alcatel (forming Alcatel-Lucent), Bell Laboratories and the former Research and Innovations division of Alcatel were combined into a single organization.

2016 brought yet another consolidation, as Nokia acquired Alcatel-Lucent to create a new Nokia.