[leprechaun9]

AT&T got what it wanted!

At the time there was very little growth in the VOICE telephone business. However, DATA was in its infancy and promising to be a very large business.

1. AT&T wanted to get into the DATA transmission business and wanted to enter the computer industry.
2. AT&T recognized that the GOVERNMENT would never let AT&T into the Computer business while they had a monopoly on the telephone lines (i.e., INTERNET access).
3. AT&T was willing to give up the local telephone business as a price to get into the computer business. The big error was that AT&T was not prepared (had no experience) in the open marketplace.
4. The day that AT&T signed the consent decree for divestiture, the U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT dropped its long standing lawsuit agianst IBM for being a monopoly in the computer business.

The rest is history.

[Roccus]

Pretty good summation except for #1.
ATT was in data transmission for many years before divestiture.
Since I had been in TTY/Data repair for 14yrs at the time of divestiture, I made the mistake of going with ABI (American Bell Inc.) This later morphed into ATTIS (ATT Information Systems.) Management at ATTIS was all gung-ho about taking on Big Blue. Trouble was, they didn't know what they were doing. They hired sales people away from IBM and were taken over the coals by them in short order.