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From: ndallen@contact.uucp (Nigel Allen)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: The "Bell" Logo
Message-ID: <15311@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 7 Dec 90 01:19:00 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 872, Message 9 of 13


Before the former Bell System adopted the stylized bell logo that
Bellcore and some operating companies still use, AT&T and its
associated companies used a more natural-looking bell-in-a-circle. You
may notice this on some older manhole covers.
 
Bell Canada used the older bell-in-a-circle logo for a long time (with
the accompanying text "local and long distance service", I believe).
It never adopted the stylized bell of the former Bell System. Rather,
it replaced its old logo with a wordmark, the word "Bell" in a bold
sans-serif face, normally reproduced in blue.
 
A year or two after divesture, I was shopping in one of the grungier
areas of Toronto, where merchants use the cheapest possible shopping
bags, which often are ones bearing the name of a store that went out
of business (and so the store's liquidators sold the bags for
relatively little). One of the plastic bags bore the American variant
of the Bell logo and the name "Bell Phone Center", or whatever the
storefront outlets of the Bell System were called divesture. I assume
the bags were sold for very little (and made their way to Toronto)
after AT&T was forced to stop using the Bell logo and replaced it with
its present "Death Star".
 
Bell Canada's parent company, BCE Inc. (formerly Bell Canada
Enterprises) uses a stylized BCE in brown, to avoid any confusion with
Bell Canada.
 
Bell Canada and its affiliates avoid using the word "Bell" as part of
the name of their U.S. operations. Bell-Northern Research is the
research arm of Northern Telecom (with a minority shareholding by Bell
Canada); the company's U.S. subsidiary is simply BNR Inc. Similarly,
Bell Canada International's U.S. unit is just BCI Inc. (although I
think some BCI installation activities may have been transferred to a
company called Protocol, which may or may not be a Bell Canada
affiliate set up a few years ago to franchise telephone answering
services).
 

Nigel Allen       ndallen@contact.uucp
52 Manchester Avenue     telephone (416) 535-8916;  fax (416) 978-7736
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6G 1V3