Bell-Northern Research – 1980s - Today

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.