Is (or was) there anything inherently numeric about phone numbers?

Factual Questions
61

Okay, I just tried doing some (simulated) pulse dialing.

My phone is a Lucent model 100 (described in the two posts immediately above), and my phone company is AT&T, and my phone account with them is U-Verse which is AT&T’s own private protocol.

This phone line seems to NOT support pulse dialing. When I try it, after each digit I dial I just get a dial tone again. Like it’s ignoring it. But this is U-Verse. It doesn’t even get DSL. Instead it has its own DSL-like service, requiring their own kind of modem/router/hub box, which does Wi-Fi too.

The phone itself does seem to support pulse dialing type-ahead, which I find a bit surprising. I tried as many as three higher digits (7, 8, 9) is rapid order, and it pulsed them in sequence one at a time. Who’da thunk it?

62

Yeah, you could tap it the value of digit, with a short pause in between.

Rotating the dial wound up a spring that tapped the hang up switch for you when it unwound.

63

Old Japanese phones didn’t have letters because the Roman / Latin alphabet wasn’t universally known in Japan when phones were introduced.

Here is an image of an old pay phone, which was used into the 80s. We missionaries had these pay phones in our apartments.