Growing up in Brooklyn, NY our exchange was TRiangle 1.
When we moved to Long Island, our phone number as printed on the dial was 485-XXXX but our neighbor’s phone dial (who had lived there forever) still said IVanhoe 5.
I have a copy of my grandfather’s business card with his phone number in one corner: “FU 5-3400.” No area code.
Now, my parents, who still live in that area, must dial eleven digits (a one, the area code and a seven-digit phone number) just to call across the street.
On mobile phones you can omit the preliminary “1”, so that’s something. Still, I’d been carrying a mobile for at least a year before I learned of this.
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ETA: The third 27- exchange was BRighton. There’s a Brighton Way in the BH business district between Santa Monica and Wilshire, so maybe the exchange was located there.
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I wonder what word the FU was. FUji? FUnston?
Ten-digit dialing is a relatively new phenomenon, like twenty years or so. The number for the local paper’s classified ad department was 444-4444 They had a radio jingle that went something like,
For a car or a boat
Or a horse or a goat
Dial four, four, four, four-four, four-four Then the announcer would break in, “If that’s too much to remember, just keep punching four 'til someone answers.”
Doesn’t surprise me a bit.
Remember, this is a country where it’s impossible to revamp currency whose denominations were set in the 19th Century or earlier, because it would outrage too many people, or the wrong people.
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I attended the University of Florida in the late 90’s. Like other posters, we only had to dials 4 digits when in the dorms to connect to another dorm, since they all started with the same first three numbers.
I’m also old enough to remember the shift from 7 digit to 10 digit dialing. There was a time, youngsters, when you only dialed the area code for a long distance call. Local calls didn’t need it.
And I recall an anecdote that President Eisenhower didn’t know how to use a phone when he first entered the White House. It sounds ridiculous today until you consider that there was a transition period that went from picking up a phone and hearing an operator answer to picking up a phone and hearing a dial tone.
Actually, there’s a much more realistic reason than ‘public outrage’. That doesn’t really make much difference.
There are corporations that make money from the way our currency is, and they don’t want any changes.
For example, replacing the dollar bill with a coin would make much economic sense. But it would really hurt the single Massachusetts company (Crane Co.) that makes the cloth that US currency is printed on. (For years, bills to eliminate the paper dollar were opposed by Sen. Edward Kennedy & then Scott Brown, powerful Senators from Massachusetts.)
And it would also make sense to eliminate the nearly worthless penny coin, but the entire copper mining & processing industry opposes that.
And, in general, any attempts to make US currency more sensible are subtly opposed by the big financial & credit card companies – they would much prefer that customers get in the habit of paying for everything with credit or debit cards rather than cash. Because that eventually means more business for them.
These corporate interests have much more influence than any short-lived ‘public outrage’.
FUlton, most likely.
Having an Operator was Phase II. The first phones were basically all party lines, and each party on the line had their own ring pattern, and you’d just crank up the pattern you wanted. For a reference, here’s the Gasoline Alley where Skeezix and Nina meet.
Yeah, I’m a geezer too.
Sounds good.
Here’s Chicago’s exchanges for those interested. Note that the same two-letter exchange may stand for two different things, depending on what number follows. For example, BE is BElmont, if it’s followed by a 5, but BErkshire, if followed by a 7, and BEverly, if followed by a 3 or 8.
My exchange name was CLiffside. Neighbors would also have BIshop, and a bunch of other ones. I have no idea what the connection with “cliffside” or “bishop” is with anything around here. Some of those exchange names are streets, or neighborhoods, but many of them I have no idea where they came from. I suspect Mr Downtown may be able to shed some light on this.
My home phone in the '40s was 4682-M (Rollingwood, CA)
Exactly. I didn’t say it would outrage everyone, but just certain people. Of course there is a large segment of the population, possibly a majority, who will defend their paper single dollar bills and or pennies to their dying day, at least on the Internet.
pulykamell, I don’t think CLiffside or BIshop had any particular local meaning, but were born of desperation to come up with something that would fit 25 or 24, sometime before the Bell System’s list of recommended exchange names was developed. Here’s an interesting article about choosing exchange names that looks to have come from a Bell System employee magazine about 1953.
Overnight, I began wondering whether any non-Bell companies used exchange names. A look at LA area central offices, where a lot of the Westside and PCH area was served by General Telephone, turned up several examples. Did General use them in other cities where they didn’t have such extensive local toll traffic? Anyone here from Indianapolis, Tampa, or Honolulu ever have a phone number that started with two letters?
There was never a “Z” on the dial. 9 was “WXY”.
About 1963, in an effort to teach us about mnemonics, a teacher told us how he remembered his first phone number.
He pictured two cats eating a bluejay.
His number was 281-J.
In Mr Downtown’s link, there is a picture of a rotary dial telephone. On the “0” digit is the letter “Z”. Here’s another. Note that some have a Z and others omit it. My guess is it evolved over time, and when the Z was no longer used, it disappeared from the dial.
That would make little sense, though, at least in my day. No prefix had a 0 or 1 in the first two digits: that was reserved for operator, long distance and area codes, so having a “Z” on 0 would serve no purpose for mnemonics.
Where I lived, it seemed like all the prefixes in the city started with 2, and the next largest city in the state started mostly or all with 3 and you did not get to the large numbers until you got to the smaller towns. Back in the days of rotary dialing, it was a lot faster to dial smaller numbers.
There was no Q, either.
1 - nothing
2 - ABC
3 - DEF
4 - GHI
5 - JKL
6 - MNO
7 - PRS
8 - TUV
9 - WXY
0 - Operator
Cite. 24 used letters on eight stops.
When it was deemed necessary to have those two letters, practice (Not being set by Ma Bell anymore) varied. Everything was buttons by then so sometimes they would be wedged into 7 and 9 (7 - PQRS 9 - WXYZ), sometimes the 1-key and rarely, the 0-key.
True, and that explains why 212 & 213 were first assigned to large cities (NY, LA).
But there’s more…adjacent areas were assigned quite different area codes to avoid confusion as much as possible, a nod to human foibles, not computers. What if 212, 213, and 214 were all in the same area? Not a problem to a computer, but confusing to a human.
According to this site (not sure how valid that is),
And some care was taken to avoid prefixes (NXX) identical to area codes (NPA) in the same area.