How to keep something working and resilient 24/7/365 is extremely fascinating to me, and a lot of the old Long Lines stuff was built with the idea of attempting to survive a possible nuclear war. Even the reason why locations were chosen were part of that.
The Idea Factory is a worthwhile read. One of the concepts that AT&T operated on during monopoly times seemed to be focused on providing a “gold-plated” premium service.
My understanding was that MCI rolled in and set up dollar-store version of Long Lines, with sound quality to match. They used that as the basis to challenge AT&Ts monopoly to steamroll shitty service everywhere.
The cream-skimming that happened with profit-first MCI resulted in the loss of a resilience mindset and long-term planning for a national network.
I've gotten sucked into 1950s/60s/70s Pan Am (the defacto U.S. flag carrier of the era) advertising videos and the concept is similar to AT&T: premium service, basically a monopoly.
Problem is: prices were REALLY high.
Competition worked out in Part 121 airlines and telco, in the long run.
Fun fact for the young: Sprint (long before being bought by T-Mobile) was primarily a long-distance company, and they advertised that the sound quality was "so good you could hear a pin drop". Many ads featured this bouncing pin (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cbzf9amfo from 1986).
The logo they used until just before the buyout was a stylized image of a pin falling down.
