When I moved into my first very-own, just-me apartment in the summer of 1980, one of the things I had to do was to have a telephone installed. In those days, that didn’t take a lot of shopping around, as there was only one game in town: Northwestern Bell. I signed up, and in due course, I was delivered an enormous, heavy, black, rotary-dial desktop phone, which I leased from Northwestern Bell, and I was ready to make and receive calls. Unlike today, that’s all one could do.
A couple of years later, though, the Bell System monopoly was broken up by the federal government. Being only 20 and having a limited understanding of what was really going on here, I asked my older sister, who at the time was a Yellow Pages sales rep for Bell. She put it simply enough: I was about to have a lot more choices in phones and services. It was an interesting case study; an old, moribund, complacent…
