The Bell Telephone Laboratories, generally known as Bell Labs, were originally owned by AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph Company) and Western Electric Corporation (the manufacturing arm of AT&T). Bell Labs are one of the most successful commercial research organizations. The products of Bell Labs include Shannon’s seminal work on information theory, the transistor, and the UNIX operating system, and 11 members of staff have won Nobel prizes. AT&T was broken up in 1984 and restructured in the mid-1990s. Its systems and technology arm became a separate company under the name of Lucent Technologies and it is to this company that Bell Labs now belong.