MA BELL R.I.P.
Recently SBC and AT&T merged. What is the new stock symbol for the combined company?
Richard H. -- Address withheld

The new company, called AT&T, trades under ticker symbol T – the same one that was issued to American Telephone & Telegraph when it was founded over 100 years ago.

SBC, originally the Southern Bell Company unit of AT&T, was spun off along with the rest of the regional Bell operating companies when the U.S. Justice Dept. broke up AT&T in 1982 in one of the biggest anti-trust cases in U.S. history. After losing control of the nine “Baby Bells” AT&T got the long distance and manufacturing businesses, along with the government’s blessing to get into the computer business.

At the time, before competitors began sprouting like mushrooms and cheap calling plans virtually wiped out profit margins, all this seemed like a pretty good deal for AT&T. The computer business was becoming increasing entwined with telecommunications networks and long distance looked like a great business to be in. The regional companies, by comparison, were seen by some as lumbering, old utilities that would never be able to grow much faster than the population.

What a difference two decades make. Today, long distance service has become a commodity, and the real action now is in serving up ever-more varied data services to local customers. Over the years, four of the regional units gradually merged in one big company called SBC. (Bell Atlantic and NYNEX combined to form Verizon; Ameritech got bought by Qwest, and BellSouth is still on its own.)

AT&T, meanwhile, tried to move in the computer business (buying NCR in 1991) and later the cable TV business (buying TCI in 1997). But nothing seemed to work; most of the company’s assets were eventually sold off. By the time AT&T was bought by SBC last year, the company’s most valuable single asset was probably its name.