Lucent Technologies
 |
|
| Public | |
| Industry | Telecommunications equipment |
| Fate | Merged with Alcatel SA |
| Predecessor |
Western Electric Bell Labs AT&T Technologies |
| Successor | Alcatel-Lucent |
| Founded | September 30, 1996 |
| Defunct | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Murray Hill, New Jersey, United States |
| Revenue |
 US$9.44 billion (2005) |
|
Number of employees
|
30,500 (2006) |
| Website | www |
Lucent Technologies, Inc., was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the United States. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business unit of AT&T Corporation, which included Western Electric and Bell Labs.
Lucent was merged with Alcatel SA of France in a merger of equals on December 1, 2006, forming Alcatel-Lucent. Alcatel-Lucent was absorbed by Nokia in January 2016.
Lucent means "light-bearing" in Latin. The name was applied in 1996 at the time of the split from AT&T.
The name was widely criticised, as the logo was to be, both internally and externally. Corporate communications and business cards included the strapline 'Bell Labs Innovations' in a bid to retain the prestige of the internationally famous research lab, within a new business under an as-yet unknown name.
This same linguistic root also gives Lucifer, "the light bearer" (from lux, 'light', and ferre, 'to bear'), who is also a character in Dante's epic poem Inferno. Shortly after the Lucent renaming in 1996, Lucent's Plan 9 project released a development of their work as the Inferno OS in 1997. This extended the 'Lucifer' and Dante references as a series of punning names for the components of Inferno - Dis, Limbo, Charon and . When the rights to Inferno were sold in 2000, the company Vita Nuova Holdings was formed to represent them. This continues the Dante theme, although moving away from his Divine Comedy to the poem La Vita Nuova.
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