 RBOCs were more prof- itable and powerful than had been expected. The fruits, and perils, of competi- tion were largely yet to be seen, at least outside of the long distance arena. And the biggest round of investment in long distance facilities that was made possible by divestiture did not take place until later, when the Internet boom fueled demand that could not be met by the earlier round of fiber-optic build-outs. Endnotes See, for example, the official history of Lucent Technologies (successor to Western Elec- tric) at http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/history.html. The Great Telecom Meltdown [2] See, for instance, Office of Technology Assessment, Information Technology R&D: Critical Trends and Issues, 1985, p. 115. The 1ESS processor was designed for high reliability, not a characteristic of most early- 1960s computers. It was in several respects quite far from the mainstream of computer design. Such custom-designed processors dominated network applications until the 1990s, when commodity microprocessors took over the role. The "Bell System" was a group of telephone companies that paid a share of their gross revenues to AT&T as a license fee. It consisted of the 22 Bell Operating Companies that were controlled by AT&T via total or majority ownership and two companies in which AT&T held only a minority interest (Cincinnati Bell and Southern New England Telephone). [5] Ward, R. C., 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, The Chaos of Convergence: A Study of the Process of Decay, Change, and Transformation Within the Telephone Policy Subsystem of the United States, Virginia Tech, http://www.scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-0698-91234/, p. 265. According to Charles Jackson, a member of the House Subcommittee staff from 1976 to 1980, Roncalio filed it at the behest of a friend from an independent telephone company but had no personal interest in the bill. As such, he filed the bill before its backers were actually ready, thus giving the opposition a "heads up." Ward, R. C., 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, The Chaos of Convergenc