Both US DoD, and my worldwide airline employer had similar internal systems at one time. Typically the first 3 digits identified a facility or region, and the latter 4 the phone within that facility.
Both systems are long gone now. DoD has something newer, the airline simply gave up on the idea as pointless in the modern era.
One state university I attended belonged to a state wide “free” telephone system. You could call any other state govt number anywhere within the system without going thru AT&T’s regular long distance system. There were govt phone books around.
And if there was a suitable exchange in a another city, you could dial into it and the out to any local number in that city.
One of my fellow TAs exploited this system to talk to someone for hours late at night without them having to pay long distance fees. Problem is, these calls were logged and this was considered abuse. (The state was still paying and it was for official use only.) They suddenly became an ex-TA.
I’m probably revealing way too much here, but this company also had something that your airline didn’t have at that time (because no one in the world had it) and that even the DoD was just starting to develop – namely a global digital information network.
The Canadian division of this company was short-sighted and considered the network just an email service. All employees had email access, but with very limited storage and virtually no access to other network resources. One of my achievements at this company that I fondly look back on was requisitioning a computer system and setting it up as a full-fledged node on the corporate global network, and making all its resources available to the local office. I was able to do this in part because one of the company’s guiding philosophies was (paraphrased) “do whatever the hell you want, as long as it’s useful to the company”.
What the DoD was funding under the auspices of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – ARPA – became known as the ARPAnet. It eventually broke out from limited military and academic use and became a public resource. Today we know it as the internet, and it’s no longer even capitalized. That was in essence what this company had pioneered, and earlier than the DoD.
USAF started down the road to worldwide digital networking in 1958 and had a bunch of it in the late 1960s. Yep sixties.
The airline industry had a worldwide quasi-email system in 1969. Running on this backbone.
Very primitive, though, and as your own cite says, eventually superseded by the ARPAnet. The system I’m talking about had features not only like FTP, but also direct access to remote file structures as network devices.
ETA: One thing the airline industry deserves major credit for in the area of data communications is the innovation of packet-switching. It came about in airline reservations systems long before the advent of X.25.
Instead of making it mandatory to dial the area code first, effectively giving everybody a 10 digit phone number, couldn’t we have just gone to eight digits, having all existing customers simply add a zero for the eight digit. We wouldn’t have needed new area codes for a long, long time. I had like three area codes over maybe an eight year period, and it was annoying.
Arkansas had one Area code (501) until the late 70’s.
Then they split the state. Top half 501 and bottom (below Little Rock) 870. They recently created 2 more. We’re up to 4 now.
IIRC there was a transition period you could omit the area code when dialing within that area.
At some point Ma Bell brought new equipment online and the area code became required.
Funny story. I setup my parents Win 95 pc. Somehow I set the phone dialer to always add 1 to the number.
My parents got a large phone bill. All the local calls were being billed as long distance. That required a extended call to the phone company. They did waive the local call charges.
I quickly changed their pc’s dialer settings. I don’t remember now what I did wrong.
I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t dial the prefix within my town. It was 862- for everybody. We dialed the last 4 digits. Then Ma Bell added new prefixs. Everyone had to dial 7 digits. That’s not fun on a rotary dial.
correction, we dialed 2-xxxx or 3-xxxx depending on the persons three digit prefix.
This was only within town.
The full prefix became required later. A lot of people complained. Rotary dials were cumbersome with longer numbers.
^^Same in my rural community up until sometime in the 1980s. The last five numbers would connect you. I don’t recall being able to dial just the last four.
What was done was consistent with the capabilities of the vast infrastructure of old fashioned non-computerized telephone equipment in place at the time. All of which is now long retired with more flexible computers in their place.
Retraining the public is always a major obstacle.
The idea of adding a suffix of e.g. zero then later spreading that into other values later is in fact one of the proposals for where the USA’s (North America’s actually) phone dialing system goes next. The difference is they’re thinking of going to 4-digit area codes rather than 8-digit subscriber numbers.
See here for history of how the system evolved to date:
and here for various plans to expand beyond 3+7 dialing once needed:
In Lancaster, CA in the '70s and '80s, the prefixes were 942 and 943. You could dial with five digits: 2-#### or 3-####. Palmdale is seven miles away. Its prefix was 947, and you could dial 7-#### in Palmdale. But to call from Lancaster to Palmdale (or vice versa), it was a long-distance call so you had to dial 1 plus the full number.
It was five digits for me too. I initially thought we only dialed 4. Had to think about it for a bit to remember.
Australia did a renumbering in the 1990’s. Most numbers in the two largest cities (Sydney and Melbourne) had been 7 digits - preceded by a 2-digit area/state code. An extra “9” was added between the area code and the phone number. Other numbers elsewhere (of varying lengths) were adjusted to this standard 2+8 format.
Yes. When I was growing up, if you dialed within the same exchange, you only needed the four digits. I could call my father’s work that way. This didn’t change until 1970.
Even better, the town next to us allowed you to call by only giving three digits (or less for the older numbers). Of course, they didn’t have dial phones (many phones didn’t even have a dial – see below); you picked up the phone, got the operator, and gave the three numbers. Eventually they switched to a four-digit number; a leading zero was added. I don’t know if that was before or after they went to seven digits.
To call in, you dialed a number to get the town operator and gave the three digits.