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I had no idea that Nokia had bought Bell Labs.


More specifically, Nokia bought the parent company of Bell labs, Alcatel-Lucent.


To provide more context, Alcatel-Lucent was a merger of the French Alcatel and Lucent. And Lucent was formed when AT&T divested technology business units including Western Electric and Bell Labs.


To go further, in the 1920s, AT&T[0] was required to divest its international operations, which were sold to newly-formed ITT. Much of those assets eventually went to Alcatel.

[0] the original pre-1984 AT&T, not Southwestern Bell d/b/a AT&T


I have a bunch of old telecom / networking / engineering equipment from mostly the 80s-90s and it’s always fun to figure out who owns or owned some IP or product.


In 2015 apparently, says wikipedia.




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