It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business unit of AT&T Corporation, which included Western Electric and Bell Labs.

[5] This same linguistic root also gives Lucifer, "the light bearer" (from lux, 'light', and ferre, 'to bear'[6]), who is also a character in Dante's epic poem Inferno.

[5][7] This extended the 'Lucifer' and Dante references as a series of punning names for the components of Inferno - Dis, Limbo, Charon and Styx (9P Protocol).

The Lucent logo, the Innovation Ring,[8] was designed by Landor Associates, a prominent San Francisco-based branding consultancy.

One source inside Lucent says that the logo is a Zen Buddhist symbol for "eternal truth", the Enso, turned 90 degrees and modified.

[10] After the logo was compared in the media to the ring a coffee mug leaves on paper, a Dilbert comic strip showed Dogbert as an overpaid consultant designing a new company logo; he takes a piece of paper that his coffee cup was sitting on and calls it the "Brown Ring of Quality".

[12] One of the primary reasons AT&T Corporation chose to spin off its equipment manufacturing business was to permit it to profit from sales to competing telecommunications providers; these customers had previously shown reluctance to purchase from a direct competitor.

At the time of its spinoff, Lucent was placed under the leadership of Henry Schacht, who was brought in to oversee its transition from an arm of AT&T into an independent corporation.

[15] She played a key role in planning and implementing the 1996 initial public offering of a successful stock and company launch strategy.

[17] In 1997, she was named group president for Lucent's US$19 billion global service-provider business, overseeing marketing and sales for the company's largest customer segment.

According to Fortune magazine, "In a neat bit of accounting magic, money from the loans began to appear on Lucent's income statement as new revenue while the dicey debt got stashed on its balance sheet as an allegedly solid asset".

[25] In 1997, Lucent acquired Milpitas-based voicemail market leader[26] Octel Communications Corporation for $1.8 billion,[27][28] a move which immediately rendered the Business Systems Group profitable.

When it was later revealed that it had used dubious accounting and sales practices to generate some of its earlier quarterly numbers, Lucent fell from grace.

[36][13] In June 2000, Lucent announced it would acquire Chromartis, an Israeli maker of optical network equipment, for $4.5 billion[37][38] In November 2000, the company disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had a $125 million accounting error for the third quarter of 2000, and by December 2000 it reported it had overstated its revenues for its latest quarter by nearly $700 million.

[40] In 2000, Lucent received the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing at the Mount Olive, New Jersey Product Realization Center.

The spinoffs of enterprise networking and wireless, the industry's key growth businesses from 2003 onward, meant that Lucent no longer had the capacity to serve this market.

[3] Serge Tchuruk became non-executive chairman, and Russo served as CEO of the newly merged company, Alcatel-Lucent, until they were both forced to resign at the end of 2008.

A 1,015-lb second generation Flexent Modcell cabinet was introduced in October 1999 for production as PCS (1.9 gigahertz) and TDMA (time-division multiple access) cellular (850 MHz) versions.

[52] The facility introduced several self-managed work teams called PODs (Production On Demand) to assemble and test 50 Flexent Modcells daily.

[51] The location was also active in research and development of CDMA minicells for future global market growth and third generation W-CDMA (Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access) innovation.

[51] In June 2002, Lucent announced closure of the manufacturing building by the end of the year, due to the telecommunication losses in operations.

[54] The architectural firm, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates (KRJDA) designed five structures clad in energy-efficient, tinted, low-E glass.