 cases was asked why neither decision was appealed. His answer was that no one at AT&T ever thought they would lose the case, SO when the Order came down against them, they did not have enough time to mar- shal forces for an appeal. There have been plenty of other 'who would have thought' situations in the telecommunications industry. During the mid-1970's Northern Telecom (now called Nortel) and ROLM (now Siemens) introduced the first digital telephone systems and the battle was on for what would be the 'office controller.' The other contenders were IBM with its mainframe model and a newcomer, a tech- nology called Ethernet, that was being promoted by DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) and Xerox. Who would have thought that the newcomer could defeat such en- trenched opponents? And who would have thought that AT&T would shed its equipment arm, Western Electric, which became Lu- cent and has split again with the entity manufacturing business telephone systems now being Avaya. Who knew that the Regional Bell Operating Companies, created by The Telecom Handbook * 301 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE the AT&T divestiture, would outperform AT&T and wind up as the dominant carriers? And who would have thought, as the debate raged over the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (described below) that competition for local tele- phone service would be SO unsuccessful?" In 1982, after the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against AT&T, what is known as the Modification of Final Judge- ment (MFJ) was reached. Under the MFJ, AT&T was to divest its twenty-two existing Bell Companies into seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs - pronounced "R- box"). AT&T agreed to the break-up of the Bell companies on the condition that it could provide long distance service with al- most no restrictions. The RBOCs were completely restricted from offering long distance service, information services and the manu- facturing of telecommunications equipment. In January of 1984, the culmination of this antitrust suit over which Judge Ha