Bell-Northern Research (BNR) was one of the world's premier research and development organizations in telecommunications. Jointly owned by Bell Canada and Nortel Networks, and based in Ottawa, Canada, it pioneered the development of digital technology, and created the first practical digital PBX, (SL1), and central office (DMS). Under the direction of then Nortel Chief Officer, John Roth, BNR lost its separate identity in the 1990s, and was folded into the Nortel R&D organization. While BNR was a highly innovative and successful organization, much of this was lost with the Nortel absorption in the bubble era. The phrase research and development (also R and D or R&D) has a special commercial significance apart from its conventional coupling of research and technological development. ... Telecommunication is the extension of communication over a distance. ... Bell Canada Enterprises, legally BCE Inc. ... Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and now familiarly known simply as Nortel, is a telecommunications equipment manufacturer giant headquartered in Canada. ... A digital system is one that uses numbers for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display, rather than a continuous spectrum of values (an analog system) or non-numeric symbols such as letters or icons. ... A Private Branch eXchange (also called PBX or Private Business eXchange) is a telephone exchange that is owned by a private business, as opposed to one owned by a common carrier or by a telephone company. ... This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. ... In the field of telecommunications, a central office or telephone exchange houses equipment that is commonly known as simply a switch, which is a piece of equipment that connects phone calls. ... DMS may stand for: degree-minute-second method  method of writing angles (such as 22°3000 instead of decimal 22. ... John Roth, is the former CEO of Nortel. ... The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive, the last decade of the 20th Century. ... Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved idea, good, service, process or practice that is intended to be useful. ...

History

For much of its early history, Bell Canada was an operating division of Bell in the United States. Development and manufacturing of their various telephony products generally took place in the US, and then, to avoid duty, were manufactured in Canada at their Northern Electric subsidiary, the Canadian analog to the US's Western Electric. Northern Telecommunications Networks, commonly known as Nortel, is a telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Canada. ... Western Electric (sometimes abbreviated WE and WECo) was a US electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995 . ...

Northern Electric spun off a subsidiary in 1934, Dominion Sound Equipment, originally to develop equipment for sound in movies. Over time the division evolved in an attempt to use up some of its design talent and manufacturing ability on 3rd party projects, and in 1937 this aspect became the Special Products Division. For many years the SPD was used as Bell Canada's R&D arm, although as in the past most telephony designs were created at Bell Labs in the US. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

In 1949 the US Justice Department forced Bell in the US to break up into its individual parts, their telephony assets becoming AT&T, and Bell Labs and Western Electric becoming independent. Bell Canada had the choice of becoming a division of AT&T, but instead decided to become independent as well. Products could now be bought and sold on an open market, and as their product development grew, the first "real" R&D lab was opened outside of Ottawa in 1961 as Bell Northern Research. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is a Cabinet department in the United States government designed to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. ... AT&T Inc. ... Template:Hide = Motto: Template:Unhide = Advance Ottawa/Ottawa en avant City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Ville dOttawa, Ontario, Canadas Location. ...

BNR's researchers pioneered the view that a telephone switch (PBX) was best considered to be a special form of real-time computer, a view that was considered to be highly innovative in the 1970s. Although George Stibitz had foreseen this evolution at AT&T in the 1930s, subsequent generations of engineers, prior to the 1970s, regarded the switch as a "piece of hardware", best hard-wired to handle the basic telephone call where two parties contact, speak, and hang up. In the field of telecommunications, a central office houses equipment that is commonly known as simply a switch, which is a piece of equipment that connects phone calls. ... A Private Branch eXchange (also called PBX or Private Business eXchange) is a telephone exchange that is owned by a private business, as opposed to one owned by a common carrier or by a telephone company. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Real-time. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... George Stibitz (April 20, 1904 – January 31, 1995) was a Bell Labs researcher mostly known for his 1930s and 1940s work on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element. ... AT&T Inc. ... // Events and trends A public speech by Benito Mussolini, founder of the Fascist movement The 1930s were described as an abrupt shift to more radical lifestyles, as countries were struggling to find a solution to the global depression. ... Look up engineer in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the calling party and the called party. ...

In the 1970s, however, this view was coming under a great deal of strain. Increasingly, telephone users wanted to conference call, forward, and record the voice greetings, so common today. BNR's solution to this problem was to finally computerize the switching system, introducing the Meridian SL-1 in 1975, the world's first all-digital switch aimed at medium sized businesses. Northern Electic had introduced their first PBX system in 1969 with the electromechanical SP-1, but the SL-1 was smaller, much more reliable, and offered many more features. The SL-1 was followed by the DMS-100 and other models in that line for "high end" needs with hundreds of thousands of lines, and then the Meridian Norstar for smaller offices with up to 192 lines. All of these used a standardized data networking system known as Switch56, similar to but incompatible with ISDN. A conference call is a telephone call where the calling party wants to have more than one called party listen in to the audio portion of the call. ... The DMS-100 Switch is one of a line of Digital Multiplex System (DMS) telephony switches manufactured by Nortel Networks. ... ISDN is also short for isosorbide dinitrate Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a type of circuit switched telephone network system, designed to allow digital (as opposed to analog) transmission of voice and data over ordinary telephone copper wires, resulting in better quality and higher speeds, than available with analog...

Through the 1980s attention turned from pure hardware to software development. Their Toronto lab introduced Meridian Mail in the 1980s, which went on to be a very successful product and forced the introduction of similar products from other telephony vendors. They later added automatic call distribution and other similar services. Template:Hide = Motto: Template:Unhide = Diversity Our Strength City of Toronto, Ontario, Canadas Location. ... Meridian Mail was one of the earliest all-digital voicemail systems, running on Northern Telecoms (now Nortel) Meridian digital PBX systems. ... ACD, see ACD (disambiguation) In telephony, an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is a device that distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals that agents use. ...

At its zenith in the early 1980s, when it opened R&D centers in Mountain View, and later in Richardson, Texas, BNR's notable American employees included Whitfield Diffie, a noted authority on cryptography, and Bob Gaskins, who invented PowerPoint at BNR, using new bit-mapped displays to make presentations to management. The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ... Mountain View is the name of some places in the United States of America: Mountain View, Arkansas Mountain View, Contra Costa County, California - near Martinez, California Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California - in the Silicon Valley Mountain View Acres, California San Bernardino County Mountain View, Colorado Mountain View, Hawaii Mountain... Nickname: none Motto: {{{motto}}} Official website: http://www. ... Whitfield Diffie Bailey Whitfield Whit Diffie (born June 5, 1944) is a US cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography. ... The Enigma machine, used by Germany in World War II, implemented a complex cipher to protect sensitive communications. ... Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program developed for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS computer operating systems. ... Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ...

At that stage, the culture of Bell-Northern Research resembled that of Apple Computer, in that employees were rather lightly-supervised, and a rather collegial culture prevailed. This was found to increase responsiveness, both to customer needs for new technology, and the effective maintenance of existing technology. But in a similar fashion to Apple, this culture grew its own corporate immune system. Basically, abuse of scientific and technical freedom caused management to increase control, not in the form of traditional work rules, but by more detailed emphasis on schedule and deliverables, and a de-emphasis on the engineer's ability to "pushback", and delay schedule for technical reasons. Organizational Culture refers to the values, beliefs and customs of an organization. ... Apple Computer, Inc. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

BNR's products were architecturally-based on Complex Instruction Set (CISC) architectures prevalent in the 1970s, and as such, were deeply "layered" in a way that reflected the BNR ethos of putting the engineer, and a certain need for elegance, in the front seat. Thus the SL/1 featured TWO layers of firmware to make it possible to make "SL/1 switches" in a range of sizes, and on a series of underlying technologies. This was greatly influenced by the late 1970s success of the DEC VAX computer, a highly "elegant" and rather layered technology, realizable in a range of power, because of this CISC approach. A Complex Instruction Set Core (CISC) is a microprocessor instruction set architecture (ISA) in which each instruction can execute several low-level operations, such as a load from memory, an arithmetic operation, and a memory store, all in a single instruction. ... A Complex Instruction Set Core (CISC) is a microprocessor instruction set architecture (ISA) in which each instruction can execute several low-level operations, such as a load from memory, an arithmetic operation, and a memory store, all in a single instruction. ... The Parthenon on top of the Acropolis, Athens, Greece Table of architecture, Cyclopaedia, 1728 The following article focuses on built environment, the architecture of spaces designed for human habitation. ... Work ethic is a set of values based on the moral virtues of hard work and diligence. ... VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ...

In the 1990s, however, John Roth subscribed to the idea that this "proprietary" technology was part of the problem, and that Nortel needed to buy and assemble systems using off-the-shelf components and using the leaner Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) approach. BNR lost its independence in the 1990s and was slowly folded directly into Nortel. Unfortunately, the excessive spending that this outsourcing strategy demanded collided with the collapse in the demand for Nortel's products, and since that time, Nortel has cut its work force from 60,000 to 30,000 people. Proprietary indicates that a party exercises private ownership, control or use over an item of property, usually to the exclusion of other parties. ... Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... Outsourcing (or contracting out) is often defined as the delegation of non-core operations or jobs from internal production within a business to an external entity (such as a subcontractor) that specializes in that operation. ...

"Build it strong / and build it stout / out of things / you know about" is a saying reputed to come from BNR.

References

• Knights of the New Technology: The Inside Story of Canada's Computer Elite, Longmans 1983, describes the innovations, and some of the personalities.