Comment by Aloha
3 years ago
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.
Bell labs was doing research for AT&T, a telephone service company.
Much of what Bell Labs researched had little direct application to Telephones.
Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of basic research, materials science, and things with no direct commercial application.