Verizon was founded in 1983 as Bell Atlantic Corporation by AT&T Corporation as one of seven Baby Bells that were formed due to an anti-trust judgement against them. It then inherited one of the seven Bell Operating Companies from American Telephone & Telegraph Company (later known as AT&T Corp.) following its breakup.

Bell Atlantic originally operated in the U.S. states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, as well as Washington, D.C.

In 1994, Bell Atlantic became the first Regional Bell Operating Company to entirely drop the original names of its original operating companies. Ameritech and NYNEX (and SBC Communications in 2002) simply added d/b/a names to its operating companies; U S West and BellSouth had merged their operating companies.

In 1996, CEO and Chairman Raymond W. Smith orchestrated Bell Atlantic's merger with NYNEX. When it merged, it moved its corporate headquarters from Philadelphia to New York City. NYNEX was consolidated into this name by 1997.

Prior to its merger with GTE, Bell Atlantic traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the "BEL" symbol.

Verizon services

Voice: Verizon provides several different types of land line services - standard POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) service as well as VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and optical fiber line services. In addition, Verizon offers long distance services. Verizon also offers a product that is a joint venture with Microsoft called "Verizon Web Calling", a type of VoIP service used within Windows Live Messenger

Voicemail: Verizon provides Verizon Voice Messaging  voicemail service for residences and businesses.

Wireless: For Verizon's wireless division, see Verizon Wireless.

Verizon VoiceWing: Verizon VoiceWing is a Voice over IP (VoIP) service offered Deltathree and resold by Verizon that offers phone service over a broadband Internet connection. A DSL, cable, or Verizon FiOS Internet connection, a regular telephone, a router, and a telephone adaptor are required for service.

Video: Verizon launched its FiOS Video service in Keller, Texas on September 22, 2005. FiOS TV uses an optical fiber network to deliver more than 330 total channels, more than 180 digital video and music channels more than 20 high-definition channels, and 1,800 video-on-demand titles.Verizon also provides DIRECTV service as well.

Data: Verizon provides DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) Internet service in many areas where it offers phone service. See Verizon Online DSL. Verizon recently began offering FTTP (Fiber to the Premises, or Fiber to the Home) to some subscribers. Verizon calls this "FiOS". According to the non-profit spam monitoring organization Spamhaus, Verizon has the largest number of known spammers of all networks worldwide (as of August 2, 2007). Verizon DSL currently requires a computer running Windows to perform a standard installation, but this is only during initial setup of the DSL modem. Manual workarounds are possible with other operating systems as long as a web browser supporting javascript is available.

Directory operations: The Yellow Pages business of Verizon known as SuperPages, and is a Texas-based sales, publishing and related services with 1,200 directory titles and a circulation of about 121 million copies in 41 states. The web site receives approximately 17 million visitors a month. It had an operating revenue of $3.6 billion in 2004 and employs 7,300 nationwide.[20] In a move to leverage against higher traffic sites, Superpages linked up with Google to provide search advertising services to its millions of listed businesses. SuperPages will offer its advertisers the ability to bid for Google search terms.

With an estimated $17 billion in assets, Verizon has spun-off the business unit to finance its expansion in wireless and high-speed Internet services.[22] Verizon would not be the first Baby Bell to rid itself of its directory publishing operations; Qwest sold off its QwestDex directory services to become Dex Media, and Illinois Bell, now known as AT&T, sold its directory operations to R. H. Donnelley in 1990 ("AT&T Yellow Pages published by R. H. Donnelley").