Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. But the coveted big number, an ever-accumulating ledger balance, is a different kind of valuable number than the small number, which generally represents a distance to the origin of the number cult. Lower is better because it’s closer to the source. Elon Musk has the biggest big numbers of them all. But that doesn’t mean he could acquire every kind of valuable small number that exists. He can definitely b…
> But he can’t buy himself a low Erdős number for example. Why not? With that much money I'm sure he can spend enough to convince somebody with a low number to "collaborate" with him in some capacity. Even if it's spell checking the English text or something.
Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
121–130 of 145 posts
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There was a timeout. If you had touch tone it was faster to dial the whole thing because then the call would connect straight away.
Alternatively, in some places they actually made sure there were no common prefixes.
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#123One of the first numbers I remember is my father's auto service station: LA3-7840
This was in the 70s!
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of 999 was in order to stop accidental signalling of the intent to dial the emergency number by way of noise on the line being intepreted as dial click, which this article on BBC news seems to corroborate [1]. Having said that, that doesn't really then line up with 112 for mainland European countries, unless that is a relatively modern occurrence and they historically had different emergency numbers?…
Indeed, 999 is rather old, and many other European countries had different short codes such as 15, 17 or 110 and often they were different for police, ambulance and fire fighters, and some countries had no central emergency number at all. The coordination on 112 as a common Europe-wide number (including the UK) happened somewhere in the 1990s. Pulse dialing was on its way out by then, although it is the reason why it…
Here in Croatia they still have different numbers available for the different services, alongside the 112 "catch all".
112 – general emergency line
192 – police
193 – firefighters
194 – emergency medical assistance
195 – search and rescue at sea
There is also this:
1987 – road assistance
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
The UK originally considered using 111, but there were problems in that on windy days, trees etc brushing the lines could generate momentary disconnections = a pulse = digit 1. So false calls. 999 was choosen because it was easy to find the number 9 on the dial in the dark.
On a rotary dial 9 is hard to find, 0 or 1 would be much easier. Was the UK early with button dials?
It's not that difficult -- you find the metal fingerstop, and then move two around from it (0 and then 9). 000 would be easier, but it seems like that was already taken for other purposes.
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#126They 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.
We had "RH" - but it's not in the AT&T list that the article points to, and it has no obvious georeferent. RHode island was the wrong state, RHodesia was suboptimal, and RHombus was non-geographical and too esoteric. RHinovirus perhaps.
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#127Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#128The article seems to imply that in the US the names were arbitrary and just served as mnemonics? In France it worked in the same way, but the names referred to actual places: either the name of the town when it was small enough, or a district / neighborhood for larger cities. So your number would be "Trocadéro-12-45" or "Lourmel-78-98" for instance; and, starting in 1928, you could dial it in directly on your phone w…
> “My grandmother was extremely proud that her father had a very low number” In Finland, a local operator built the world’s first commercial GSM network back in 1991. They initially sold four-digit phone numbers as a perk. (Combined with the country code and the operator code, the numbers today look like this: +358 50 1234) Those short numbers are still being resold by their owners. I’ve heard some of them go for ten…
We had a phone number with 6 digits (without the international code in front).
When my father had to enter the phone number in some hotel form when he was abroad the guy was totally convinced he must be some sort of royal, president or another kind of very important person, when in fact we are just from a very rual part of a very small nation.
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#129Without RTFA I'd guess for operators to punch them in while connecting your call.
Re: Why did old phone numbers start with letters? (2015)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether 0 comes before 1 or after 9 has been the matter of some debate! But by the time typewriters started cementing the order of things, 0 came last, and on all the rotary phones I see on google images, 0 would take the longest to dial. Do rotary phones in Australia flow backwards? xP see also: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/76446/why-is-the-0-ne...
With pulse dialing "1" is one click, "3" is 3 clicks, "9" is 9 clicks You can't have zero clicks, so "0" would have to be 10 clicks
This is not universal. E.g in Sweden we used one pulse for 0, two for 1, etc