Designing, Building and Testing the AT&T Trimline Phone - AT&T Archives

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This film, The Quality Brand, from 1985, positions AT&T products as the quality choice, and seems aimed not just to individual consumers but also to business customers.

The film shows designers working on the phone housing, Bell Labs R&D specialists testing internal works, all the way to the intensive cold, heat, dust, and impact testing (note the Thermatron, which took the phones through extreme hot and cold temperatures).

At this time, AT&T was in the middle of re-evaluating the way they produced and marketed telephones. In 1985, they stopped producing the novelty Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, and Kermit the Frog telephones. The following year, 1986, Western Electric's main telephone plant, the Indianapolis Works, would be closed, and phone manufacturing for the consumer market would shift overseas. Business telephones and systems continued production in the Shreveport Works plant until 2001.

The number of Phone Center Stores, which had been placed nationwide in malls throughout the 1970s, would start to contract. The New York Times reported in 1985 that AT&T would phase out their remaining 700 Phone Center stores within 5 years, but it was only by 1996 that the rest were closed.

In 2012, AT&T still sells phones for home and business use — not just cell phones! You can still buy a modern trimline phone (manufactured by VTech/Advanced American Telephones for AT&T) for less than $10. But the colors of the phones sold by AT&T now are limited to just black, white, and silver, whereas back in the 1970s you could get a rainbow of colors, and by the time this film was made in 1985, there were still beiges, browns and even reds in the mix.

Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ