Nokia is the pacman of infra vendors: they acquired Siemens, then Motorola Networks (the infra part). Then recently they acquired ALU. ALU itself is the result of the acquisition by Alcatel of Lucent. And when Nortel went bankrupt, Alcatel also acquired part of the assets and employees. Sooo, lots of infrastructure vendors ended up in today Nokia. Maybe I even missed some ;)

Indeed; what remains of the old big infra vendors is now in Ericsson and Nokia. Then there are the Chinese ones: Huawei and ZTE. Probably others. But particularly Huawei is growing very fast in many markets - the Chinese government is basically giving the money away, so it's hard for others to make a profit, and Huawei takes market share. If you call it a "market" after such subsidies.

Some customers, particularly very many in the USA, are not so happy to have Huawei or ZTE core switches etc, but in emerging markets they are less worried about Chinese intelligence infiltrating them, and also in Europe there seems to be less protectionism and concerns about national security. So the Chinese are catching the global market, without the Americans noticing much.

As was Motorola in the USA

Touche.

Some here used to work for that unit. :)

Really?

That explains a lot about you: although mostly your preference for strong typing. Working for a phone company will do that for you.

Yep.

No, what explains that is that I used C for the first time in 1993, yet I was already coding since 1986.

So I was doing systems like level programming in Timex Basic, Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Z80 and 80x86 on those in between years.

Also had friends using 68000, AMOS and GFA Basic on their Amigas.

Also I majored in systems level programming, with emphasis in compilers, which meant I have spent quite some time researching old programming environments, and still do. Better than reading newspapers sometimes.

So I learned that were better ways to do systems programming without having the compromises of C.