Spectral lines: Don't hang up yet

It was not our intention to make this a special issue on divestiture. When we began our planning we promised ourselves it would not center on the separation of the Bell operating companies from AT&T. That subject, we believed, had been thoroughly covered by the press in general - from the dailies to the newsweeklies to the business press. Television had even done its share, and books had already been published by “insiders.” Our intent was to probe into the postdivestiture future of telecommunications. The assignments we doled out among ourselves reflected that intent. Nevertheless, as each editor began preliminary research, it became clear that to look ahead with intelligence meant that to study the past was a necessity. And so divestiture and deregulation became an integral part of the report.