In the 1980s, was there a way to call your home phone from the same home phone (same line) by calling your telephone number, but in reverse. I know this sounds weird. My adult brain is trying to process how much to believe my kid brain. But I believe some older kids successfully did this while I was there.
Could this be possible? Would a telephone technician in the 1980s have needed to do this?
I could call my home phone from another phone in the house in the 80s, but it had nothing to do with reversing the number. You just dialed, and then you had to time pressing the flash button to hang up for just the right moment IIRC. Then it would ring.
Nothing even as fancy as what @eschrodinger was needed here. You just got a message saying “The number you have dialed is a party on your own line. Please hang up and allow time for the telephone to ring.” Once you did that, it would ring. The only timing involved was picking up the phone again as soon as you could tell the other person picked up, so they wouldn’t hang up.
I’m not entirely sure how a system where you dialed the number backwards could work, since you’d be at least be including the prefix by that time. Well, unless it was somewhere that allowed four digit numbers, but then you’d expect the backwards number would go to another house.
I guess it could be possible that someone had two lines, and one of them happened to be a backwards number, or that your number happened to be a palindrome.
I would mean everyone had two phone numbers.
I forget the exact number, but I think it was like 990 or 991 or something. You dialed that, then the last 4 digits, it would give a tone, and if you hang up and let it up quickly, then hang up, it would call back in about 15 seconds or so.
I don’t remember the whole sequence, been almost 40 years, but I always found it funny to do when my sister was expecting a call from her boyfriend.
If your phone number is 69997855, never dial 55879996.
As you’d expect given how many different systems were in use in so many different locations over so many years there were different answers in different times and places.
@BigT describes how it typically worked on a party line.
@k9bfriender is probably the most general version.
The local loop system included a test feature so a phone tech could have the switch call back (or call any number) to confirm that a line under test could receive calls, the ringer(s) would work, etc. In real small COs it might work as he described: 3 “magic” digits plus your own final 4. In the larger areas where I lived and worked on phones, in the 70s & 80s it was a dedicated 7 digit number you could call, then after a tone enter the 7-digit number to be called back, then hang up. The CO would then call that number after a short delay.
What was that number? It changed from time to time and was different from one telco or area code to another. It was one of those open secrets that quickly got out to the phone kiddies & phreaks. So every now and then it was re-secured by changing it to something else. At least that was true where I was involved.
Part of me remembers this being a thing, but like someone else said, I feel like you had to dial your number and then hang up right away (and leave the phone on the hook) and it would ring. I have no recollection of what happened when you answered though. What I do (think that I) remember is that if you dialed your number like you dialed any other number, you’d get a busy signal.
That seems closer to what I (very likely mis-)remember. I don’t recall dialing a number backwards, but the idea of adding some type of prefix or dialing a regular number and then entering your own, hanging up and getting a callback a few seconds later sounds more familiar. There may have even been some type of outgoing message, presumably so you/the tech could not only verify that it rang, but that you could hear the person at the other end.
how i did it was calling the house number in which id hear a " beep…beep…beep" and hold down the hook or button on touch tone phones and the phone would ring …neat for distracting parents as they’d have to get up and answer the phone …
Was it the call waiting sound you were hearing (we never had call waiting so I never heard the sound it makes).
no it was just a beep that you only got when you dialed your own number …
When I was a kid in Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, we had Bell Telephone. My brother and I somehow found out what to dial to make our own phone ring and I still remember it – 985[dial tone]6, then hang up quickly. This worked on our rotary phones but I don’t think it worked after we got push-button phones.
Being the strange children that we were, my brother and I would do it and then tell our mother crazy things like it was the Pope calling her.
It was a thing that the telephone repair person could do for testing. If you dialed 119911 and hung up, you’d get a ring back.
Late 50’s in Montreal - we would drive our parents nuts by dialing “1191” and hanging up. About 5 seconds later, the phone would start ringing (but with longer ringing periods, so by listening carefully, you could tell that it wasn’t a real call). Nothing but a dial tone within seconds of answering it.
Yes, this. It’s not an Easter Egg, just a test number that rings you back. The exact number and dialling procedure (and whether part of your telephone number must be included) obviously depends on where you are and how you have it configured. So does whether you get a normal connection, a tone, nothing, etc.
We used it to save walking downstairs to the den.
My mom would call from the kitchen and talk with my dad or me in the den. It was a lot better than yelling DINNER IS READY!
The phone company occasionally changed the code. Screwing things up until we figured it out.
People today have no idea how difficult it was dealing with Ma Bell. Everybody has a phone in their pocket today. It’s so easy to call each other.
When I was little my babysitter claimed to know how to do it, but always refused to demonstrate. It still annoys me to this day that I never got to see it work. It seemed like magic at the time.
Given the info above, I could see a place set up where the special prefix to get the test call was a backwards version of the normal prefix for calling numbers. That might be enough to be remembered by the OP as “dialing the number backwards.”
Or I could see someone using the test number, but intentionally explaining it wrong, saying they were dialing the number backwards. I remember being fooled as a kid by some jokes like that.
I think we could call our number and quickly hang up to make it ring. One time when my sister “stole” our dad’s place on the couch he went to the next room and did that; when it rang, he picked it up and told my sister it was for her.
When I was very young, I was told that calling our number would allow my parents to get ahold of Santa Claus so that they could tell him that I wasn’t eating my vegetables.