Bell-Northern Research

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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 (then known as Northern Telecom). BNR was based in Ottawa, Canada, with campuses at locations around the world, including Research Triangle Park, North Carolina; Richardson, Texas; and Maidenhead, United Kingdom. Bell-Northern Research 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.

[edit] 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 (who would later become Nortel Networks), the Canadian analog to the US's Western Electric.

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.

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 in Nepean, a suburb of Ottawa, in 1961 as Bell-Northern Research.

BNR's researchers pioneered the view that a telephone switch (PBX or Central Office) 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 1970s, however, this view was coming under a great deal of strain. Increasingly, telephone users wanted to conference call, forward, and record 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 Electric had introduced their first electronic central office system in 1969 with the SP1. SP1 had a fully computer-based electronic control system, thus the name "SP", short for "stored program". Its switching matrix was however still electromechnical with its use of the minibar version of the crossbar switch. The SL-1 was fully digtial in both control and switching. As such the SL-1 was smaller, much more reliable, and offered many more features. The SL-1 design was superseded by the DMS-100 central office switch and other members of the DMS family of products. DMS extended the technology by fully integrating switching and transmission. This was a major advance that changed the way systems were built. BNR pioneered the evolution from electromechanical to fully digital systems.

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.

At its zenith in the early 1980s, when it opened R&D centers in Mountain View, and later in Research Triangle Park and 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.

BNR also had labs in Maidenhead, England, Montreal, Quebec, and Wollongong, Australia.

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.

BNR's products were architecturally-based on Complex Instruction Set (CISC) architectures prevalent in the 1970s. 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. In the early 1990s, under Nortel CEO Jean Monty, the software for the flagship DMS product was segmented into layers to improve maintainability of the product.

BNR ceased to exist as a separate company in the 1990s, as Nortel assumed a majority share in BNR, and was slowly folded directly into Nortel, who wholly acquired BNR after BCE divested itself of Nortel. Unfortunately, the collapse in demand for Nortel products in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which occurred after aggressive spending on acquisitions and hiring under CEO John Roth, required Nortel to trim its workforce from 60,000 to 30,000 people (as of 2006).

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

[edit] References

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