Their system was hopelessly outdated. If they were still around you could have what you had back then, a home land line telephone with perhaps two outlets installed by an AT&T employee, and nothing more.
This means as 56k baud modem, no cell phones, etc. But by now, your home phone might have a still image picture of the person you were talking to, that would refresh every half minute or so. Something they promised for 30 years but never delivered.
Face it, when that monster was killed, the future could begin.
Let me remind you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs
“Bell Laboratories operates its headquarters at Murray Hill, New Jersey, and has research and development facilities throughout the world. Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language, S programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.”
Yep... backwards thinking and incapable.