999 is the perfect number for germans as nine-nine-nine is homophonic to nein-nein-nein, meaning no-no-no!!!
999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#62Why isn't there an app for this?
I live in a country where emergency services are completely unreliable, so my main experience of 911 / 999 emergency services is from television and films, and I've noticed a fair amount of friction in the phone call process, especially when it comes to verbally communicating the address. In addition to the phone number, wouldn't it be useful to also have native apps for this which optionally grant GPS access and camera access at the touch of a button?
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are probably not old enough to know why you use the word "dial" when you refer to pressing keys. Actually it's the opposite. You sound like one who has never tried to "dial" 999 on a rotary dial when seconds are the difference between life and death. 999 in that moment feels like an awful choice. We are taking about emergency and as such the most important thing is time and not the rest of the reasons you menti…
I would say 999 is still the better choice as it is always the last stop on a rotary. I can imagine if they had it as 111, for example, a lot of people would be redialing from panicking and accidentally dialling too far.
> I would say 999 is still the better choice as it is always the last stop on a rotary.
No, zero is. (It would not be possible to flash the line zero times, so a zero is dialed with ten flashes.)
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#64999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
From the Wikipedia article: >As it happens, the choice of 999 was fortunate for accessibility reasons, compared with e.g. lower numbers, because in the dark or in dense smoke 999 could be dialled by placing a finger one hole away from the dial stop (see the articles on rotary dial and GPO telephones) and rotating the dial to the full extent three times. This enables all users including the visually impaired to easily…
> "dial" these "low" numbers by just quickly pushing and releasing the hook button
In New Zealand as a kid, we dialed numbers using the hook by subtracting the digits from 10 because the rotary digits were labelled the reverse of other countries. The pay phones there in the 1970's required 3 two-cent coins for a call, but not if you dialed using the hook. In the first season of The Wire, the drug dealers use the same subtract-from-10 system, but it's for their secret code using push-button pay phones.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember the emergency number being 90000 back when rotary dials were common. It's harder to misdial that 999, because you want as separated numbers as possible, and it's faster to dial because only the first 9 takes time, and then you zip through a bunch of zeroes at the end. I suspect 911 was chosen similarly.
Most rotary phone systems had 1=1 pulse, 2=2 pulses and so on, with 0=10 pulses. In that system, 0 would take even longer to dial than 9. New Zealand apparently went with 1=9 pulses, but still kept 0=10 pulses. Was there somewhere that had 0=1 pulse?
Oh wow, I had no idea the number positions varied across the world! I just assumed everyone went from 0 to 9, because it makes logical sense. :-D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_dial
That article has a UK, a New Zealand, and a Swedish phone, and you're right, all different layouts.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most rotary phone systems had 1=1 pulse, 2=2 pulses and so on, with 0=10 pulses. In that system, 0 would take even longer to dial than 9. New Zealand apparently went with 1=9 pulses, but still kept 0=10 pulses. Was there somewhere that had 0=1 pulse?
Oh wow, I had no idea the number positions varied across the world! I just assumed everyone went from 0 to 9, because it makes logical sense. :-D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_dial That article has a UK, a New Zealand, and a Swedish phone, and you're right, all different layouts.
Holy crap, that article is full of crazy gems:
> The Australian letter-to-number mapping was A=1, B=2, F=3, J=4, L=5, M=6, U=7, W=8, X=9, Y=0
wat?
> In the United Kingdom the letter "O" was combined with the digit "0" rather than "6".
nooo...
> In Norway, the North American system with the number '1' corresponding to one pulse was used, except for the capital, Oslo, which used the same "inverse" system as in New Zealand.
holy crap
> the United Kingdom selected 999 due to the ease of converting call office dials to make free calls. "0" for the Operator was already free, and the cam that removed the shunt on the line when the dial was rotated to the "0" position could be altered to include the adjacent digit "9" (and "8" if required) so that calls to "0" and "999" could be made without inserting coins.
And there we have the explanation for GPs assertation that "999" was the best number, it was instead a purely technical limitation in the mechanical construction of pay phones.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in e.g. the UK, perhaps, where 1 was two pulses (although they would be more likely to dial 000, I would think) but not in NZ, for the reason given in the comment you replied to.
Pretty sure 1 is just one pulse in the UK. Zero is at the far end of the dial next to 9.
You're right, it's been a long time since I used a rotary-dial phone (or even a keypad phone that used pulse dialing...) and information like this gets dropped off the stack of 'useful things to know' eventually ;(
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a really strange phone you're describing. Did it have a single hole on the dial? Where are you from? I too used rotary phones - I'm 28 (if it makes a difference) and I grew up in a former Soviet republic. The phone had a dial with 10 holes in it: 1-9 followed by 0 (just like on a modern phone keypad, by the way). You stick your finger in a hole over the digit and rotate clockwise until the the stop. Then, take…
Just FYI, Hacker News seems to be flagging most of your comments and making them invisible or "dead". I was browsing with showdead on and was able to "vouch" for your comment and raise it from the dead. I'm not sure what to tell you to do to fix this problem, but I thought you might want to know. I think the site tries to trick you into thinking everyone can see your comments when they're actually made dead. So you m…
Yeah, HN hates me for some reason :(
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#69Why isn't there an app for this? I live in a country where emergency services are completely unreliable, so my main experience of 911 / 999 emergency services is from television and films, and I've noticed a fair amount of friction in the phone call process, especially when it comes to verbally communicating the address. In addition to the phone number, wouldn't it be useful to also have native apps for this which op…
If you want to learn more about this, then I suggest reading about the several and various initiatives that there have been over the past few years, in the U.K., the U.S.A., and elsewhere, to deal with with the problem of VOIP and mobile telephones. They have included things such as (for example) the idea that the immediately upstream ISP, for VOIP, populates an ESDB/ALIDB with location data that it knows because it knows the physical location of the VOIP connection to its network.
The names that you want to start with are "Enhanced 911" and "Next Generation 911".
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that why the number 112 is usually used? Fast to dial, but not as easy to dial by mistake as 111.
Misdialling short numbers on a rotary phone was easy and common. If your finger slipped out of the dial it would return at that point and dial a shorter (lower) number. The most common point for a finger to slip was at the start of each turn, so if your finger slipped you would mostly dial ones or twos. You cannot dial a 9 in this way. The amount of time it took to dial 999 was inconsequential. Nothing was instant in…
There is nothing special about 9 in the rotary dial. It sits between 8 and 0. The reason for choosing nice was not because of misdials.