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Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

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Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#61

Post by vel0city »

ghaff wrote: post #25
vxNsr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must live in a very remote area to still support that. Not to mention to still have a landline, no one I know in my area will even give out a POTS line, you can only get VOIP and most households don’t have that anymore either, aside from the outrageous cost all the providers charge for a single line, there’s so many taxes and fees you end up paying close to 100% more. (E.g $40/m for the line ends up being $80). M…

Even living someplace that has fairly poor cell reception if WiFi assist isn't working for some reason, it's really hard to justify a landline as "backup" for the rare occasions I wished I had it. I got rid of it a few years ago and, while there has been a day or two I wish I had it, hard to make the case. (And, yeah, if you're going to be VOIP anyway, if your internet and/or power is hosed you're probably not in a b…

Wouldn't it be nice if your cellular provider had a SIP gateway for your number as well, and if it rang your phone it would also route to your SIP device?

Like, it's already routing calls through the WiFi. Is it really that much harder for them to allow two devices to register for the number and connect the first to answer?

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#62

Post by jbuzbee »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #30
dools wrote: post #3

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.

Olathe had POpular 4 and STate 2

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#63

Post by zw123456 »

One other fun fact about numbering, the most frequently dialed exchanges, those for big cities would use the lowest numbers, e.g. downtown would be 223 for the exchange and big cities area codes 212 and so on. The reason was not for the convenience of the dialer, remember it was rotary dial way back when a lot of those first got assigned, it was because the signaling was in band so the longer it took for the dialing to happen the longer the trunk was seized. If you have ever used a rotary phone, you'll notice it takes forever to dial 909 for example. So to optimize for the network they made the most frequently used numbers, most populated places, have the lower digits.

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#64

Post by BrianHutch »

themadturk wrote: post #60

I grew up in the Seattle area in the mid-1950s and 1960s. One of the exchanges in Seattle was MUtual, starting with MU just like NYC's Murray Hill. One year Shari Lewis, the puppeteer famous for creating the Lamb Chop and Charley Horse characters, came to Seattle to host a telethon, probably for what is now Children's Hospital. She kept forgetting that MU was the prefix for Mutual and told us to dial Murray Hill inst…

Grew up on the Eastside (of Seattle) in the SHorewood exchange. Learned our number as starting with "SH".

It was kind of fun when the first two digits of a number gave you a pretty decent idea of where someone was.

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#65

Post by nemo »

tedunangst wrote: post #39
aaronharnly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a New Yorker piece from 1962 mentioning them, at least: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/10/27/comment-4830

Haha, their big plan was to make up new prefix names.

The prefix names they offered are key to the joke:

>The group offers a handy guide to the construction of entirely personal arrangements, such as HAberdasher, YLang-yland, KNife, and WRappingpaper.

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#66

Post by brightsize »

coreyp_1 wrote: post #34

When I was a kid in the 80's (and probably early 90's) I remember visiting my grandparents and other family in Frederick, Oklahoma, and everyone there had 5-digit phone numbers. I still remember my Aunt's #, because we would stay with my grandmother for weeks at a time in the summer and would often call over to my cousin's house.

Similar: I was a kid in S. VT in the 60s/70s and everyone using the phone system used five-digit dialing. You were assigned a 254-xxxx or 257-xxxx number, but when dialing you only had to use the last five #s, as the "25" prefix was implicit. I think there was a bias on the part of the phone company for assigning 254- prefixes to residences and 257- ones to businesses, but I'm not sure how strict they were about it. I can't recall if using the full seven digits worked when calling within those two prefixes, but I think that it did. I don't remember anyone ever using alphabetic prefixes, which makes me wonder if they were perhaps used there before I was born or if it was a convention only in big cities (my town was ~10K, a bit under).

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#67

Post by kagevf »

DonHopkins wrote: post #35
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

Well that's one mystery solved: https://youtu.be/QacpBRPonzM?si=7kFqTOe9S9F0OORy I never knew why Homer gave the fictional number 'KL5-3226' ("Klondike-five") for his Mr. Plow commercial.

I knew the guy who had 1-800-FUCK-YOU, and he used it to sell those classic bumper stickers: "How's my driving? Call 1-800-FUCK-YOU!"

So he could have literally earned “FU money”!

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#68

Post by richardfontana »

whoopdedo wrote: post #54
sltkr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (which is why there is a BA but not BE, BO, or BU: it would be hard to distinguish BAldwin from BEldwing, BOldwin or BUldwin). But there is a BU, as immortalized in the Oscar-winning Elizabeth Taylor film "Butterfield 8"

My childhood phone number in Brooklyn was a BU (28) number, though even when I was a child (1970s) the use of letter exchanges was basically a holdover of a more or less dead practice. (But the use of letter exchanges in phone numbers persisted for decades after that in New York City in store signs - I think there are still some in use today.) In Brooklyn, BU stood for "BUckminster". I had this idea that this was connected to there being a "Buckingham Road" and a "Westminster Road" in the area I grew up in (Ditmas Park West and environs) but I'm not sure if that was something I or someone I knew made up. I'm sure it had nothing to do with Buckminster Fuller.

Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)

#69

Post by kagevf »

I vaguely recall there was a Twilight Zone episode that might have used “Klondike” - anybody happen to know which one? I think they picked up the phone, the operator was either already on the line, or they might’ve dialed zero, then requested the number they wanted to call. I just remember it wasn’t completely numeric.

I always had wondered what was going on with that phone number, and I think these comments have pretty much solved the larger mystery, now I’d just like to re-watch that scene again with this new (to me) context.

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