Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 at 10:13 AM EST

The wall Street Journal had a good story yesterday about AT&T and its deal making over the past two decades. But even better was the graphic that show cased all the splits and mergers of the different phone companies that were once part of the big old AT&T. Truth is it is only part of the story as once can go back even further in time for more of this tangled web of companies and add more from the mid 90s when the famous tri-vestiture tool place and AT&T (then already without the 7 Baby Bells that provided local phone service) split to create Lucent Technologies and NCR.

As you can see from the chart below, its complicated. Whether the was good or bad for the industry and mainly for the consumers is a different question and worth a separate post.