51–60 of 145 posts
They even had this in the Simpsons in the 90s, so not even 50s era! Mr Plow gives his phone number as Klondike 5 3226 and the jingle says "KL5 3226"
I'm old enough to remember my home phone number beginning NIagara-8 when I was a latch-key kid in !970's Kansas City.
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Most major metro areas in the US no longer support seven digit dialing.
Sometimes it’s just implied. At the pizza place where our cabin is (ok, it’s like a 25 minutes drive), you can just give them your last 4 numbers and they assume the rest.
Like in Nova Scotia/PEI. Technically there are two area codes, but no one actually knows what the second one is.
The other one is undesirable because if people see it they often won't even answer, assuming it's scam or such. That's how unknown it still is
902 was introduced in 1947, making it one of the first area codes used in Canada and it's been completely ingrained in the region since then. The second was only introduced in 2014.
People are mentioning this was on the Simpsons, but I remember my mom telling me this was how they used to name phone numbers when she was a kid and she wasn't even born until 1961. Lester Freeman in The Wire from 2003ish was still calling the prefix of a phone number the "exchange," even when talking about cellular service.
Born in 1961 and these articles don't touch on one thing that I remember when I was a kid: you only needed 5 numbers to dial if you were calling someone else in the same thing. This was the case at my grandparents in Bay City, Michigan in the late 1960s. My cousin's number was LIncoln 2-9729 I have never understood how that worked despite my father working for the phone company. Dad explained a lot of things, but tha…
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The article linked to the full Ma Bell list: https://web.archive.org/web/20150317062651/http://www.ourweb... It's strange to me that there are 5-6 options for each exchange, instead of a canonical name.
The article did a really poor job of explaining the logic. > It's strange to me that there are 5-6 options for each exchange, instead of a canonical name. The point isn't to assign them canonical names, but to define a mapping from the two letters at the start of a word to two-digit codes. These letter-pairs are chosen so that meaningful words can be formed with them (that's why there is no QX, because no English wor…
But there is a BU, as immortalized in the Oscar-winning Elizabeth Taylor film "Butterfield 8"
They even had this in the Simpsons in the 90s, so not even 50s era! Mr Plow gives his phone number as Klondike 5 3226 and the jingle says "KL5 3226"
I could be wrong but I think there was a period after the exchanges were used (no need to use full names) and folks continued using 2 letters as a prefix to a number because they were easier to remember that way (can still remember my cousin's 70s number to this day PL78750). You would look at the phone to determine the number for P and L.
I still remember a scene from Seinfeld where George is at the unemployment office and when the lady asks him for the business's phone number, he says KL5 8383.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)>
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Fun fact: you can still call Pennsylvania 6-5000 and get the hotel which has closed in the last few years. They used to play The Glenn Miller song when you called them...
Maybe not anymore. The building is being demolished. https://www.archpaper.com/2023/08/last-remnants-hotel-pennsy...
When they started using numeric dialing, they simply substituted two digits for the letters. My exchange was VErnon, so the two digits became 83. It was confusing for long time as I lived over the county line from Tacoma, which also had the same prefix but was long distance and remained so until cell phones pretty much erased the local long distance regime.