PacBell
The Pacific Bell Telephone Company (Pacific Bell or Pac Bell) is a telephone company that provides telephone service in California. The company is owned by AT&T through AT&T Teleholdings, and, though separate, is now marketed as “AT&T”. The company has been known by a number of names during which its service area has changed. The formal name of the company from the 1910s through the 1984 Bell System divestiture was The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. As of 2002, the name “Pacific Bell” is no longer used in marketing, Pacific Bell is still the holder of record for the infrastructure of cables and fiber through much of California. History The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, or "PacTel" for short, managed the Bell System's telephone operations in California. It grew by acquiring smaller telephone companies along the Pacific coast. It built and occupied San Francisco's Pacific Telephone Building on New Montgomery Street which has been described as a "m ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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PacBell Building
140 New Montgomery Street, originally known as The Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company Building, and, after 1984, as The Pacific Bell Building or The PacBell Building, in San Francisco's South of Market district, is an Art Deco mixed-use office tower located close to the St. Regis Museum Tower and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The 26- floor building was designed to consolidate numerous smaller buildings and outdated offices into a modern headquarters for The Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., and as a result, was designated as the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Coast Division Offices by the company, though referred to colloquially as ''The Telephone Building''. When it opened on May 30, 1925, The Pacific Telephone Building was San Francisco's first significant skyscraper development, and was the tallest building in San Francisco, until the Russ Building matched its height in 1927 at the time of its completion. The building was the first high-rise south of Market S ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New Montgomery Street
New Montgomery Street, formerly Montgomery Street South, begins at Market Street and terminates at Howard Street in the SOMA district of San Francisco, California. History Before New Montgomery Street was created, an inner street called ''Jane Street'' ran parallel to Second and Third Street. In the 1870s, ''Montgomery Street South'' was established in its place as the southern extension of Montgomery Street, one of the main thoroughfares in San Francisco's Financial District, running north from Market to Telegraph Hill. The extension was strongly supported by businessman and Bank of California founder William Ralston – who started the construction of the original Palace Hotel, at the time the largest hotel in the Western United States – in an effort to expand San Francisco's business district to the yet undeveloped area south of Market. Ralston's original plans to connect Montgomery Street to the waterfront failed due to the unwillingness of two property owners (governor Milt ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bell System
The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over one hundred years from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell (as in "Mother Bell"), as it held a vertical monopoly over telecommunication products and services in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, it had assets of $150 billion (equivalent to $ billion in ) and employed over one million people. Ever since the 1910s, American antitrust regulators had been observing and accusing the Bell System of abusing its monopoly power, and had brought legal action multiple times over the decades, until in 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against B ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pacific Telesis
Pacific Telesis Group was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies, sometimes also referred to as "RBOCs" or "Baby Bells", created in 1983 in preparation of the breakup of AT&T as a holding company for Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, Pacific Telesis International and several other non-regulated companies including PacTel Mobile Services and PacTel InfoSystems. It was acquired by SBC Communications in 1997. Pacific Telesis Group was headquartered in San Francisco and incorporated in Nevada. Nicknames Pacific Telesis is more commonly known as "PacTel." Prior to the January 1, 1984, breakup of the Bell System, the corporate name of its principal subsidiary Pacific Bell was The Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, which had also been referred to as "PacTel." After the corporate name change, Pacific Bell was commonly known as "PacBell." The red and white star trademarked logo was referred to by company employees as the "splat" or more formally as the "access symbol" af ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile telephone services in the U.S. , AT&T was ranked 13th on the ''Fortune'' 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations, with revenues of $168.8 billion. During most of the 20th century, AT&T had a monopoly on phone service in the United States. The company began its history as the American District Telegraph Company, formed in St. Louis in 1878. After expanding services to Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, through a series of mergers, it became Southwestern Bell Telephone Company in 1920, which was then a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph Company. The latter was a successor of the original Bell Telephone Company founded by Alexander Graham Bell in 1877. The American Bell Telephone Company formed the American Tele ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pacific Telephone "Call Before Ou Dig" Notice (pre-1984 Version)
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Oceania in the west and the Americas in the east. At in area (as defined with a southern Antarctic border), this largest division of the World Ocean—and, in turn, the hydrosphere—covers about 46% of Earth's water surface and about 32% of its total surface area, larger than Earth's entire land area combined .Pacific Ocean . '' Britannica Concise.'' 2008: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The centers of both the [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1906 San Francisco Earthquake
At 05:12 Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''). High-intensity shaking was felt from Eureka on the North Coast to the Salinas Valley, an agricultural region to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area. Devastating fires soon broke out in San Francisco and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died, and over 80% of the city was destroyed. The events are remembered as one of the worst and deadliest earthquakes in the history of the United States. The death toll remains the greatest loss of life from a natural disaster in California's history and high on the lists of American disasters. Tectonic setting The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that forms part of the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. The strike-slip fault is character ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Panel Switch
The Panel Machine Switching System is a type of automatic telephone exchange for urban service that was used in the Bell System in the United States for seven decades. The first semi-mechanical types of this design were installed in 1915 in Newark, New Jersey, and the last were retired in the same city in 1983. The Panel switch was named for its tall panels which consisted of layered strips of terminals. Between each strip was placed an insulating layer, which kept each metal strip electrically isolated from the ones above and below. These terminals were arranged in ''banks'', five of which occupied an average selector frame. Each bank contained 100 sets of terminals, for a total of 500 sets of terminals per frame. At the bottom, the frame had two electric motors to drive sixty selectors up and down by electromagnetically controlled clutches. As calls were completed through the system, selectors moved vertically over the sets of terminals until they reached the desired location, at ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Santa Catalina Island, California
Santa Catalina Island ( xgf, Pimuu'nga or ; es, Isla Santa Catalina) is a rocky island off the coast of Southern California in the Gulf of Santa Catalina. The island name is often shortened to Catalina Island or just Catalina. The island is long and across at its greatest width. The island is located about south-southwest of Long Beach, California. The highest point on the island is Mount Orizaba (). Geologically, Santa Catalina is part of the Channel Islands of California archipelago and is the easternmost of the Channel Islands. Politically, Catalina Island is part of Los Angeles County in District 4. Most of the land on the island is unincorporated (governed by the county). Catalina was originally inhabited and used by many different Southern California Tribes, including the Tongva, who called the island or and referred to themselves as or . The first Europeans to arrive on Catalina claimed it for the Spanish Empire. Over the years, territorial claims to the isl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Avalon, California
Avalon is the only incorporated city on Santa Catalina Island, in the California Channel Islands, and the southernmost city in Los Angeles County. The city is a resort community with the waterfront dominated by tourism-oriented businesses. The older parts of the town on the valley floor consist primarily of small houses and two and three-story buildings in various traditional architectural styles. In 1919, William Wrigley Jr. gained control of Avalon and oversaw much of the development of Avalon, including the construction of the landmark Catalina Casino. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, several different developers tried to develop Avalon into a resort destination community, but most before Wrigley went bankrupt. The population was 3,728 at the 2010 census. Avalon attracts about 1 million visitors a year and is frequently visited by cruise ships. Before European colonization, the island was inhabited by the Tongva people. History Prior to the mode ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Political Boss
In politics, a boss is a person who controls a faction or local branch of a political party. They do not necessarily hold public office themselves; most historical bosses did not, at least during the times of their greatest influence. Numerous officeholders in that unit are subordinate to the single boss in party affairs. Bosses may base their power on the support of numerous voters, usually organized voting blocs, and manage a coalition of these blocs and various other stakeholders. When the party wins, they typically control appointments in their unit, and have a voice at the higher levels. Reformers typically allege that political bosses are corrupt. This corruption is usually tied to patronage; the exchange of jobs, lucrative contracts and other political favors for votes, campaign contributions and sometimes outright bribes. History The appearance of bosses has been common since the Roman Republic, and remains fairly common or maybe widespread today. In Spanish America, Br ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |