It’s gone now, and for me it’s only from watching old B&W programming, but presumably even some here used to have a phone number that was “OKahumpka-32468” or “WOmbat-21000” or whatever.
My question… is it supposed to be easier to remember VOltron-75309 than 867-5309? And even if “everyone was just used to it and automatically did it in their head”, don’t you mentally have to translate “FIshface” into the numbers and dial the number anyway — so this is all adding a step?
Or am I missing something about why these were initially used. For people just getting used to having a phone number, was it wariness of being identified as just a number without a warm-fuzzy name on it (to make it seem more like being on 33 Park Street)?
The names originally came about for manual exchanges where you talked to the operator rather than dialing. An exchange could have no more than 10000 numbers, given by the last four digits. For large city areas, they simply found it convenient to name the exchanges that served the city rather than giving them numbers, so you lifted the receiver and told the operator “Give me Forest Hills 6738”, and so on. They didn’t cut over to dial service overnight, so there was a period where the exchange names had to coexist with dial numbers. Hence, the alphabetic digits on dials, and a mapping of exchange names to numbers. Inertia accounts for the alphabetic prefixes hanging around long after most manual exchanges had gone the way of the dodo.
Well, that and the fact that they actually were a lot easier to remember, given that the names were not really the sorts of random words that the OP gives as examples, but mostly abbreviated forms of the actual names of the places (towns or whatever) that you were trying to connect to.
I’m not old enough to remember needing an operator to make a call (except for long-distance), but we had exchange “names” until I was in high school. What this meant was that everyone in our neighborhood had numbers that started with, say, WAshington-1, followed by 4 digits. The “WA1” part was easy to remember, since everyone in your community had that. So you really only had to remember the other 4 digits. And you never had to translate the letters into numbers. The letters were right there on the dial, along with the numbers.
I also remember “party lines,” which we had until I was around 7 or 8. That meant that there were a cluster of about 5 or 6 homes that shared the same phone number. Sometimes you’d pick up the phone and hear your neighbor’s conversation, or they’d hear yours. Polite people would excuse themselves, or tell them it’s an emergency, etc. Not-so-polite people might eavesdrop. It sucked.
Regarding area codes, in the “olden days” major cities were given area codes with the fastest speed in dialing (before touch-tone telephones). For example, Washington D.C. (202), New York (212), Los Angeles, (213), etc., etc. Of course, now things have changed with many, many area codes and much faster ways of calling.
I still don’t get how I can pick up this small gizmo abot the size of a fag packet, press a few buttons, and talk to someone on the other side of the world. It doesn’t need a mortgage to pay for the call either.
I remember, as a young man in London, I took a girl to the post office so that she could call home to Canada. We went to a counter and she filled in a form with the details and paid a load of cash. We then sat waiting until she was called to a kiosk to receive the call. It must have taken a good half hour.
All through the time I was growing up, we had a Crestview-5 number. As best I can recall, it was still common for people to give out their numbers that way at least through the 1960s. On paper you’d just write CR5-XXXX, or whatever, but verbally a lot of people still said the full exchange name.
In our community there was also a BRadshaw exchange whose numbers also mapped to 27-. I didn’t know anybody with a BRadshaw number and wondered how there could be two exchanges in the same locale with the same starting digits. I still don’t know for sure, but I suspect that of the 10K phone numbers that were theoretically possible, some were allocated to CRestview and the rest to BRadshaw, possibly distinguished by the first digit after the alpha part.
Hollywood had HOllywood, and in the case of some of the famous hotels and restaurants on the Boulevard, the last four digits were-and are–the street address. Hollywood was unusual in having a like-named exchange name, elsewhere in and around L.A. it was rare if not non-existent. One reason may be that exchange names were chosen to be easily understood, when fully pronounced as well as when you just said the two letters, so they tended to stick to easy Anglophone names. It was an important consideration given that operators from all over the country might need to connect calls to a given locality; they might be unfamiliar with foreign sounding place names even if all the locals did know them.
I grew up with ATlantic 7 in Portland, Oregon. There was also a BUtler 7 exchange, which was confusing because they are the same exchange (287). I don’t think there was any overlap in the last four digits between the two.
In 1980, I was in a homestay situation in Tokyo, Japan. When I wanted to call the US, I didn’t want to hassle with my homestay family about paying them back for an international call, so the only other way was to go down to the KDD office and make the call there. It wasn’t quite as bad as bob++'s experience related upthread, but it was a nuisance going there. In 10 months in Japan I only called the US twice.
Roddy
Oh, and about the exchange names having local significance . . . we were in suburban Cleveland, but our exchange was “WYoming.” Never could figure that out.
My folks had a party line when I was a kid. They might have had it until we moved away in the late 70s - and in our new location, you could be connected to anyone in the local exchange by dialing only 5 numbers, which was pretty convenient.
I may be mistaken, but I think they were using 3 digits with exchange names before going to the four digit version. I remember seeing some old phone numbers from the DC area, probably dated from the early 50s. I think 2 letters were used for the exchange also. But this must haved varied by region. And I’m sure there were even simpler systems before that.
Didn’t have to be as far as Canada. In 1980 I spent at least that much time in a post office in Paris calling all the way to Oxford. (Of course it was France …). Similar stuff - you give the number and waited for a booth.
Exchanges were originally run by one switch, so it was possible that a real old one could only handle 1,000 numbers. In certain places you could call within your exchange by only dialing five numbers also, like you can in most pbx systems.
As for converting names to numbers - I never did that. I was always BA9 (BAyside 9) never 229 - and seeing it as 229 still looks odd.
Probably. The town near us must have originally had three digit numbers, since they all began with “0.” They had an operator system until about 1960; the phones didn’t have dials, but you could pick it up and say,“289, please” and it would be put through.
If you were calling from outside the exchange, you dialed the central operator and told her the number – three digits were usually fine.