I would love to see some kind of web database of old engineering notebooks like this, surely there are enough now kicking around in boxes of "grandad's junk".
Would be cool to see some old notebooks from Bell Labs tho like Ritchie or Thompson. I just found some old AT&T training manuals on Perl, TCP/IP, Bash, C and Unix internals, they are really cool.
Along the same lines, my bedside-book for the last few months has been Engineering and Operations in the Bell System[1].
It is... from another time. Both the quality of the engineering and the quality of the documentation simply don't happen anymore outside of very narrow niches.
And then you look at the Death Star now, and their core competency is lobbying. Priorities certainly have changed.
I have the full set of books in this series, took me a couple months to track down.
There are no organizations left in the world like pre divesture AT&T - While I think divestiture was a net gain, it's clear that some things were not positive, and some stuff was irrevocably lost.
I've only read about the AT&T divestiture in the "pro-antitrust" light; that AT&T owned all the telephones, you weren't allowed to connect your own, etc etc. Where can I read other angles to this story?
Thinking about it, I wonder if this isn't a similar story to Eternal September.
