Bell-Northern Research (BNR) was a
telecommunications
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...
research and development company established In 1971 when
Bell Canada and
Northern Electric
Northern Electric was an electricity supply and distribution company serving north east England.
History
It had its origins as the North Eastern Electricity Board, formed as part of the nationalisation of the electricity industry by the Elect ...
combined their R&D organizations. It was jointly owned by Bell Canada and
Northern Telecom
Northern may refer to the following:
Geography
* North, a point in direction
* Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe
* Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States
* Northern Province, Sri Lanka
* Northern Range, a r ...
. BNR was absorbed into
Nortel Networks
Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in Montreal, Queb ...
when that company changed its name from Northern Telecom in the mid-1990s.
BNR was based at the
Carling Campus
National Defence Headquarters Carling, or NDHQ Carling (originally Carling Campus), is a site containing federal government buildings near the Crystal Bay area in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The campus, located at the intersection of ...
in
Ottawa,
Ontario
Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...
, Canada, with campuses at locations around the world, including
Research Triangle Park,
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...
;
Richardson,
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
;
Ann Arbor,
Michigan
Michigan () is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the List of U.S. states and ...
; and
Harlow and
Maidenhead,
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
. Bell-Northern Research pioneered the development of
digital technology Digital technology may refer to:
* Application of digital electronics
* Any significant piece of knowledge from information technology
Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange a ...
, 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.
[
]
History
For much of its early history, Bell Canada operated as the Canadian division of the
Bell System. 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 (which would later become
Nortel Networks
Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in Montreal, Queb ...
), the Canadian analog to the US
Western Electric.
Pre-1970s
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 its design talent and manufacturing ability on third party projects. 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 before, most telephony designs were created at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
in the US.
In 1949, the United States Justice department attempted to force
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 te ...
to divest itself of its
Western Electric subsidiary. As a result of this legal action, Western Electric sold its shares in Northern Electric to Bell Canada.
In 1957, Northern Electric started its own research and development labs in
Belleville, Ontario
Belleville is a city in Ontario, Canada situated on the eastern end of Lake Ontario, located at the mouth of the Moira River and on the Bay of Quinte. Belleville is between Ottawa and Toronto, along the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor. Its populat ...
. Two years later, Northern Electric created the
Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories in
Ottawa.
1970s
In 1971, Bell Canada and Northern Electric combined their R&D organizations and formed Bell-Northern Research.
BNR's researchers pioneered the view that a
telephone switch
telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syste ...
(
PBX or
Central Office) was best regarded as a special form of
real-time computer, a view that was considered to be highly innovative in the 1970s. Although
George Stibitz
George Robert Stibitz (April 30, 1904 – January 31, 1995) was a Bell Labs researcher internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was known for his work in the 1930s and 1940s on the realization of Boolea ...
had foreseen this evolution at AT&T in the 1930s, subsequent generations of
engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...
s, prior to the 1970s, regarded the switch as a piece of hardware, best hard-wired, to handle the basic
telephone call
A telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the called party and the calling party.
First telephone call
The first telephone call was made on March 10, 1876, by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell demonstrated his ability to "ta ...
where two parties connect, speak and hang up.
In the 1960s, however, this view was coming under a great deal of strain. Increasingly, telephone users wanted to
conference call
A conference call is a telephone call in which someone talks to several people at the same time. The conference call may be designed to allow the called party to participate during the call or set up so that the called party merely listens into ...
, forward, and record voice greetings, so common today. Such features required more flexibility in the controller, leading to the development of computer-controlled switching machines, notably the Bell Labs − Western Electric 1ESS. These early machines still had an analog, usually electromechanical switching matrix because the technology of the time did not permit the cost-effective dedication of a filter-codec to each subscriber. (Transmission systems had already gone digital, for example the D4 carrier system.)
Northern Electric introduced its first electronic central office system in 1969 with the
SP1. The SP1 had a fully computer-based electronic control system, thus the name "SP," short for "stored program." Its switching matrix was still electromechanical. Rather than the reed relay matrix of the 1ESS, it used the minibar, a version of the crossbar switch.
BNR was, with
Northern Telecom
Northern may refer to the following:
Geography
* North, a point in direction
* Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe
* Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States
* Northern Province, Sri Lanka
* Northern Range, a r ...
, a part owner of
MicroSystems International
Microsystems International Limited (MIL) was a telecommunications microelectronics company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, founded in 1969. MIL was an early attempt to create a merchant semiconductor house by Nortel Networks (then Northern Elect ...
a semiconductor manufacturer based in Kanata, outside Ottawa.
The Digital Switch
BNR introduced the
Meridian SL-1 in 1975, the world's first all-digital
PABX
A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX).
A business telephone syst ...
aimed at medium-sized businesses. The SL-1 was fully digital in both control and switching. As such the SL-1 was smaller, much more reliable, and offered many more features than an equivalent electromechanical system. The SL-1 design evolved into Meridian-1, and subsequently the CS1000x as Nortel's private network (or enterprise) flagship offering.
The SP-1 design was superseded by the
DMS-100
The DMS-100 is a member of the Digital Multiplex System (DMS) product line of telephone exchange switches manufactured by Northern Telecom. Designed during the 1970s and released in 1979, it can control 100,000 telephone lines.
The purpose of ...
central office switch and other members of the DMS family of products (DMS: digital multiplex switch). DMS extended the technology by fully integrating switching and transmission. This was a major advance that changed the way systems were built.
BNR's products were architecturally based on
Complex Instruction Set (
CISC)
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...
s prevalent in the 1970s, and on a series of underlying technologies. This was greatly influenced by the late 1970s success of the
DEC VAX
VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...
computer, a highly "elegant" and rather layered technology, realizable in a range of power. In the early 1990s, under Nortel CEO
Jean Monty
Jean may refer to:
People
* Jean (female given name)
* Jean (male given name)
* Jean (surname)
Fictional characters
* Jean Grey, a Marvel Comics character
* Jean Valjean, fictional character in novel ''Les Misérables'' and its adaptations
* J ...
, the software for the flagship DMS product was segmented into layers ('Base', 'Telecom', and 'IEC' or Inter-Exchange Carrier) to improve maintainability of the product. The IEC layers were customer-specific, targeted towards Sprint, MCI, and a large group of small "United Carrier" companies that were subsequently swallowed up by Worldcom. Once the IEC layer was established, customer-specific releases could occur quarterly, whereas Telecom and Base programming was for baked-in code that only had infrequent, maintenance updates.
1980s
Through the 1980s attention turned from pure hardware to software development. The BNR
Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...
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
An automated call distribution system, commonly known as automatic call distributor (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs direct calls based ...
and other similar services.
At its zenith in the early 1980s, when it opened R&D centers in
Mountain View,
Ann Arbor and later in
Research Triangle Park and
Richardson, Texas
Richardson is a city in Dallas and Collin counties in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2020 United States census, the city had a total population of 119,469. Richardson is an inner suburb of the city of Dallas.
It is home to the University ...
, BNR's notable
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
employees included
Whitfield Diffie
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5, 1944), ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper ''New Dir ...
, a noted authority on
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
, and
Robert Gaskins Robert Gaskins was one of the creators of PowerPoint, and an expert and author on the history of the English concertina.
Education and professional work
Gaskins was educated in Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, and subsequ ...
, who invented
PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPo ...
after leaving BNR, influenced in part by BNR's response to the very cumbersome presentation tools used by his department there. J.W.J. Williams, the inventor of
Heapsort
In computer science, heapsort is a comparison-based sorting algorithm. Heapsort can be thought of as an improved selection sort: like selection sort, heapsort divides its input into a sorted and an unsorted region, and it iteratively shrinks the ...
was also an influential figure in the development of digital switching.
[Penny and Williams (1982)]
As part of its internal IT infrastructure, BNR also created an email system called COCOS (COrporate COmmunication System), and a powerful relational database system called GERM (General Entity-Relationship Model).
BNR also had labs in
Maidenhead, England,
Montreal
Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...
, Quebec,
Edmonton
Edmonton ( ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta. Edmonton is situated on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, which is surrounded by Alberta's central region. The city ancho ...
, Alberta,
Wollongong
Wollongong ( ), colloquially referred to as The Gong, is a city located in the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. The name is believed to originate from the Dharawal language, meaning either 'five islands/clouds', 'ground near wa ...
, Australia, and
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and List of cities in Japan, largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, ...
, Japan; as well as
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
, Georgia and
Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1990s
With the formation of Bell Canada Enterprises (later shortened to
BCE
Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...
) in 1983 as the parent company of Bell Canada and
Northern Telecom
Northern may refer to the following:
Geography
* North, a point in direction
* Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe
* Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States
* Northern Province, Sri Lanka
* Northern Range, a r ...
, BNR in Canada was jointly owned 50-50 by Bell Canada and Nortel. Nortel assumed a majority share in BNR in 1996, and BNR was gradually folded into Nortel, which acquired the remainder of BNR when
BCE
Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...
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 96,000 (in 2001) to 35,000 people (as of 2006).
See also
*
Nortel Networks
Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in Montreal, Queb ...
*
Bell Canada
*
Nortel Retirees and former employees Protection Canada (NRPC)
References
* ''Knights of the New Technology: The Inside Story of Canada's Computer Elite'', Longmans 1983, describes the
innovation
Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed entit ...
s, and some of the personalities.
*
*
B-NSR
{{Authority control
Bell Canada
Companies based in Ottawa
Nortel
Research and development organizations
Research and development in Canada
Telecommunications companies established in 1971
Companies disestablished in the 1990s
Canadian companies established in 1971