Steven Lichter wrote:
Lyrical Nanoha wrote:
On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Chris Morse wrote:
* TELENET
I don't know if they are still around these days, but Telenet was/is a
packet-switching network owned by GTE.
I doubt it, and GTE itself is gone too (they got eaten up by Bell
Atlantic and thus became Verizon, which coincidentally is my current ISP).
-uso.
There is a little more to that merger, GTE was the bigger company. I
retired just before the merger and still do contract work on their
network when I feel like it. A lot of their upper management are former
GTE, they were going to close the corporate HQ in Texas, but instead
have made it larger and a lot of the functions for the company were
moved there. A lot of the government communications operations were
moved there as well as Thousand Oaks. Not the same company.
GTE Wireless may have been bigger, but Bell Atlantic ate them for
lunch. Many middle-managers disappeared, and eventually, Bell
Atlantic's systems replaced GTE's, and my employer, EDS, finally lost
the account.
I was there, under the tents at the new campus in Alpharetta, GA, when
they announced their new name. And I knew it wasn't to be the same
company.
That was the high point of my career, working on the Point of Sale team
for GTE Wireless, later doing system support for the CMIS Billing
system as well...
I remember there was an older gentleman who liked to eat his lunch on
the wooden crosswalk between two of the buildings. Story goes when the
new CEO or president of the company visited and saw this, he told one
of his flunkies that he wanted him gone by the end of the day. So, they
fired him, later on finding out he was the only person who knew a
particular system/application. I suppose just a rumor. But I do
remember the day he visited, and I never saw the old fellow again.
My career ended there when Verizon finally pulled the plug on our POS
application. This is when I found out that my position was fully-funded
by them up to that point, and EDS didn't want to assume the
responsibility...