Except I suppose I should say "telephone keypad now, but um, anyway…
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_378b.html
Most of the phone numbers in the Pennsylvania town where I grew up started with 39x-. This comes from an exchange called EXpress. So the X was used at least once…
I read that column, but I didn’t look to see a date…
At present, my office phone (a Comdial) has nothing on the number 1; PQRS on the 7; and, WXYZ on the 9. OPER is spelled out on the 0 key.
CRAZY!
But a good story nonetheless.
Same with me in West Los Angeles, (390, 391, 397 and 398). Ours was called EXmont.
Haj
checks cel phone
P-Q-R-S (on the 7) and W-X-Y-Z (on the 9)
So the wonders of modern technology have allowed us to use all 26 letters of the alphabet. Yay.
Any Chinese cel phone users here? How do those work?
What about Japanese ones? There’s something like 50 different letters, isn’t there? (And that’s just hiragana alone.)
Regarding X and Z appearing on cell phones and such: This is for text messaging type services. In fact, same with all the other letters. That’s all they are there for. (Or calling 1-800-CantCount.)
Here’s a site with a database to which you can add your old exchange name/number, if it’s not already there; mine is.
I don’t know how popular SMS (or TXT) messages are in the US, but they are huge here, and therfore all letters will be required on the keypad of cellphones (we call them ‘mobile phones’) these days.
X has always been included on the telephone dial. It was Q and Z which were the 2 characters left off.
See
here for some history on this.
That’s a really cool link, Thin Ice! I can now give my telephone numbers as HUdson 7-xxxx (cell) and TUckerman 5-xxxx (home and work)! I always wondered what the exchanges in my neighborhoods growing up in Little Rock stood for. Now I know! CApitol and SKyline. (There were at least two 75 exchanges in North Little Rock, 753 and 758, so I’d always figured it must have stood for something.)
Now, here’s the question–what was the point of naming exchanges, anyway? Why complicate things with abreviated names (which might be confusing anyway) instead of just using numbers like we do now? Does it have something to do with the early days of telephone service when you rang an operator who connected you with the right exchange, where another operator would connect you to the right extention, and no one dialed any numbers at all?
I know the X was always on the dial, t-bonham, but the column I linked to in the first post implies that it was useless as part of an exchange name. I wanted to point out that although it might not have been the most commonly used letter, it wasn’t completely useless.
I think they figured it would be easier for people to remember a word (or two letters) with one number plus four more numbers than a seven digit number. That was back in the '50s, before we used numbers for everything.
It is easier to remember mixed alpha/numeric “numbers”; research has demonstrated that clearly. But that comes at the price of confusion between Oh and Zero, and among Eye, Ell, and One, and AT&T finally decided that it would be best overall to let people write things down.
But is that the reason? I have a hard time believing that Ma Bell decided way back when that it would complicate the telephone dial and add letters that don’t actually add any information at all simply to lessen the number of digits people would have to remember by two. For some reason it just doesn’t seem plausible.
The exchanges came before the dial, when you had to give the number to the operator. The usual scheme then was AA-NNNN. This was later extended to AAN-NNNN.
I was guessing that it predated direct dial. But was the exchange actually identified by letters, or did you simply tell the operator the name of the place you were calling, i.e., “Pennsylvania, number 6-5000”? What purpose could the letters serve before direct dial (unless the operator actually needed to dial them)?
At some point, obviously, the exchanges stopped being the names of places, and it became an arbitrary code that could use names, letters, or numbers, since it didn’t actually mean anything. Did that happen before or after direct dialing became available?
“PEnnsylvania 6-5000” was, in fact, a number in New York City.
Exactly. The conversion from manual to dial took decades. In the meanwhile, the inter-exchange trunks were automated first, so an operator at a manual exchange could dial a call for you after you gave her the number, and the rest of the switching/call completion would happen automatically. Or if you were calling a manual exchange, she could dial the foreign exchange operator (automatically) and then verbally request the number (6-5000).
Exchanges are/were not consistantly named after the place in which they were located, but rather given a unique name that fit the numbering plan. Those names are still in use (internally) today, to a certain extent.
Back in the days of rotary-dial(even for operators), the exchange numbers (and area codes) were generally assigned according to the length of the dial-pull(how far the dial had to be turned and then allowed to click-click-click-click out the number). More “important” exchanges (ones with lots of businesses and therefore lots of phone traffic) were assigned short dial pull codes, which is why central business districts frequently have exchange names such as “CApitol” or “CEntral”, since 22/23 is the shortest possible dial-pull (1 or 0 was not allowed in the first 2 digits of the exchange).
The same logic applied to area codes, hence 212 for NYC and 213 for LA(and 907 for AK and 808 for Hawaii).
Hate to correct you - it was EXbrook
Thanks for that website! If you are older than 50, you will no doubt wax nostalgic by hearing the old telephone prefix names! One could tell which part of town one was calling by these names. Another thing lost in this digital age…
tadc, I’m not sure I understand you. It sounds like the exchange names were always a mnemonic for numbers, which were always dialed by the operator, if not the customer. Is this right? Or was there a time when the exchange name was just a name, and didn’t translate into any numbers at all?
I thought (based on vague memories of old movies and tv shows) that early operators wouldn’t dial a number, but would physically make a connection by plugging a cable into the socket for a given exchange or extention. If this is the case, it doesn’t seem like the exchange name would refer to anything but the label next to the appropriate socket.