I’m not that old – under 40 – and I remember in our town when I was little we could just dial 5 numbers to call someone within our exchange. If I called home from school, I could just dial 4-3819.
In fact, our phone system didn’t even support touch-tone phones until the 1980’s. We did eventually get those button phones that converted the number into a pulse, however, so we didn’t need to use a dial.
Yeah, he was some sort of executive. How aware or unaware he was about peoples’ schemes, I don’t know. What I meant was, he would have been dismayed that an ol’ college buddy was taking steps to deny Ma Bell her just due.
I asked my Grandmother and she said it was a bit more complex. According to her, not all communities were the same, and those rules other people said basically applied to places served by Ma Bell.
She also said it wasn’t always the first two letters. She said her old number was MERcy-1678 and you had to dial THREE numbers, because there weren’t enough subscribers to add another digit.
She also said, some smaller towns it was even less and you couldn’t get them. For instance she said her friend was Delany-16. Because the town was so little, and she couldn’t dial her friend directly she had to call the operator and ask for Delany-16
I meant dial the first THREE LETTERS, not three numbers
There was a time when the exchanges were only two letters: EXchange 1234. One Ellery Queen TV episode reflected the fact, as it was an important plot point.
A man was murdered in a phone booth, and unable to speak, phoned a stranger. Queen deduced that the murdered man had dialed the last name of his killer. It eliminated one suspect whose name began with Z and another who had seven letters in their name. The actual killer had six letters – seven was too much. I always thought that this was a bit of a cheat – Queen challenged the viewer to guess the killer – since no one watchin in 1975 would have known that fact.
Maybe. When I was a kid they were trying to get everyone onboard with buttons. To that end, at the State Fair of Texas AT&T had a booth with two glass enclosures. In one was an operator with a rotary phone in the other an operator with a push button phone. The idea was that they would both dial a random number they were given to see which was fastest. There was quite a crowd and quite a few skeptics. Seems the average joe had to be convinced push buttons were more effecient.
That didn’t matter around here. People weren’t going to pay extra for that kind of fancy fooferah, and the phone company charged you extra for everything. Customers kept getting party lines as long as they were available. No extension phones, nothing with a lighted dial, just one black desk phone with a dial. I remember one customer who was particularly thrilled when I told her colors were now available at no extra charge. Colors? Do you remember some of the odd colors the Bell System had? She made me describe each color to her over the phone, since we had nowhere a customer could actually *see *anything. Then, some of our customers discovered that you could request a single phone in multiple colors and we didn’t charge extra for that, so that was all the rage for a while, at least in the area where I was working. There were some wierd-looking Western Electric phones out there.
One of my friends in grade school would make a collect call to his house to leave messages for his mom. At this time it was all done by computers, so when the ‘operator’ said “Please state your name” he would say “going to Joey’s after school” Then it would call his mom and say “We have a collect call from ‘going to Joey’s after school’ would you like to accept the charges?”
Yeah, my parents’ exchange in a rural area still didn’t have DTMF in the 90s. One factor was that companies were not eager to replace the old switching equipment which did not support DTMF in some of those exchanges. Some of the old electromechanical switches had planned amortizations over periods like 20 years.
Some individual exchanges, particularly those operated by independents, could get away with less than seven digit dialing for quite some time after the NANP was created. Eventually, they wound up having to require a full seven digits to distinguish the numbers in the area code they were in, as new numbers were assigned. For instance, imagine that there are no seven digit numbers beginning with “4” in that area code. Individual exchanges can administer their switches to use the leading 4 to collect 5 digits rather than 7, and subscribers can still dial 7 digits to get to other numbers in the exchange, and dial 1 ahead of long distance calls. I’m not saying that is what was going on - it was probably more complex. But it’s the sort of consideration that went into these things.
There used to be a practical joke that relied on the lack of a ‘Q’ on the phone dial: You told someone that they could get their horoscope for free just by calling ‘aquarius’. They would dial the ‘a’ and hunt for a while before they realized they’d been had.
They used to never have the numbers 0 or 1 in any exchange which made it convenient later for the phone system to use those numbers for things like long distance. All area codes had a 0 or 1 as the second digit, which is how the system knew it was an area code and not a local exchange. This has changed now though (my cell number has a 0 as the second digit) because dialing 1 before the area code makes it unneccessary.
I’ve gotten a bunch of calls from people who are used to dialing an area code for some local numbers and forget to dial the 1 first for long distance. Apparently my exchange prefix is also the area code for somewhere in Pennsylvania. If you have the same area code as me and you dial the number for a certain hospital in PA without dialing 1 first, the system uses the first 7 digits you dial to make a local call to my number.
It’s amazing how many people just can’t believe that they dialed a wrong number:
“You’ve got the wrong number.”
“No, I don’t know what room your uncle steve is in–you dialed the wrong number.”
“No, I can’t transfer you to admissions. This isn’t an East Coast hospital. You’ve reached a West Coast cell phone. You have to dial 1 before the area code to get long distance”
“Yes you do have to dial a 1. If you don’t, you’ll just keep getting me.”
“Yes. By all means, do complain to the hospital administrator about me…If you ever manage to figure out how to call the hospital. Be sure to tell them that the guy in CALIFORNIA who answers when you dial the WRONG NUMBER is rude and unhelpful. Bye”
“Oh, hello, it’s you again. Well it’s me again, too. Still the wrong number. Still have to dial 1 first. No, I can’t connect you to uncle steve’s room…”
Q as in QUincy-1212 was used in the same way as 555 is used in TV and movies for a nonesuch number. If I remember correctly from the old MAD magazines.
They had one of those set up at the phone company offices around 1974. You’d dial a number and then use TouchTone to dial the number; a timer would tell you how long it took.
Regular dialing: 11 seconds
TouchTone: 4 seconds
So you saved seven seconds a call. My question is what would you do with the time you saved?
It’s been this way at every office I’ve worked in. I think it’s fairly typical.
This also seems to be very typical. Q: How do you know when you’re working too many hours"
A: When you dial ‘9’ at home.
Even worse than ‘regular’ party lines were the ones where they had to ring all the phones on a given circuit whenever anyone got a call. How did you know which calls to answer? They used ring patterns, the distant forefather of today’s ring tones. Your pattern might be 2 longs and a short, for instance, while the Browns down the street were long-short-long.
I did a short stint doing collection calls for Grants sometime in the 1980s, and there were a few people I had to call in some town in New Hampshire, <something or other> Island where this system was still in use. You had to call a special operator and then tell her the code for the party you wanted.
Hmm. Can’t find the name of that place, but here is a directory/explanation of how it worked, from 1935.
There’s a nice gag in the movie Dave. The President’s stand-in (Kevin Kline) is sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office for the first time. He picks up the phone with some trepidation and asks, “Do I have to dial 9 first?”
From what I’ve gleaned from old labels, advertisement, address books, and such, the most common exchange in my hometown was EXpress. And indeed, 39x-xxxx numbers still dominate today for numbers in town. (29x-xxxx numbers are also common; I’ll assume that’s a late addition to take care of rising demand rather than due to some hypothetical AXmurderer exchange.)
52x-xxxx numbers are reasonably common out in the county - I don’t know if the fact that we’re talking about LAncaster County has anything to do with it.
Fella bilong missus flodnak commented once that this old system seemed needlessly complicated. I replied that he comes from a country where the numbers on the telephone dial went the other way 'round in the capital city than in the rest of the country. He allowed that that didn’t make a whole lot of sense either 
9 tells the PABX that you want an outside line (if your extension is authorised to get one). It may or may not return a second dial tone.
About once a month at my work there’s a call over the PA system: Would whoever dialed 911 please call the switchboard?
We should be dialing ‘8’ for an outside line so that 9+1+<error 1> instead of 9+1+<another digit starting an area code> doesn’t get confused with ‘911’.
My senior year of college, I knew a guy who shared his number with the Phillipine Consulate of Chicago. The difference was he was 847 area code, and the consulate was 312 or 773. This was back before 847 required all 10 digits to dial from it. (That restriction was added when the 224 overlay was implemented.)
So people in 847 that would dial the consulate would forget that they needed to dial the Chicago area code and would end up calling my friend instead. The paticularly amusing moments were when he would have to explain this to someone who wasn’t very good at English. I think the only foreign language he could speak was German, which wasn’t going to help much.