[ QUOTE ]
It was the largest telephone corporation which invented two of the most important pieces of technology of the 20th century--the vacuum-tube amplifier and the semiconductor. The latter was also subsidized by a large amount of tax dollars.
...
But the technology to apply this invention to universal long-distance coverage required the investment of billions of dollars, which required the structure of the world's largest corporation to accumulate.
[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah. Thank god for Ma Bell. After all, if we didn't have a government-created telephone monopoly, we might have had touch tone phones, answering machines, modems and god knows what else decades ago instead of being stuck with dazzling array of choices that we had:
From 1940 until nineteen eighty-[censored]-FOUR:
THAT'S PROGRESS!
Oh, well, there were SOME options.
1959:
1965:
Wow.