Beats me. What’s that from? We were OL for Olympia. They would do the name then 1 digit for the exchange, then the four numbers. We OL8-something something something something. I have no idea why they chose Olympia, there was no place with that name in the area I can recall.
I don’t personally remember people giving out numbers that way but I do remember my Mom’s phone book had my pediatrician’s phone number written in it that way. He started with OL which was OLympic and his office was on Olympic Blvd.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Backwater Under_Duck
Which begs the question, no really, what did the “BR” in “BR-549” stand for?
Running gag from “HeeHaw”. Junior Samples auto sales. “Call BR-549”.
You had to be there.
It was appropriated for a modern CW band, BR549.
It was certainly easier to remember our number GRAnite 3277 than 472-3277. Each exchange handled 10,000 numbers and an operator had a big 100x100 plug board. If he needed to move a call to another exchange, he used a trunk line (in England, I believe long-distance calls are still called trunk calls). BTW, they were mostly men with long arms to cover the board. Then they needed more exchanges and introduced GR2 (ours), GR3, etc. But we still thought of them as granite, etc. Then they ran out of pronounceable combinations. The first one I saw was TT in NY. Actually, that could have been VUlcan, but they wanted to wean us off of exchanges, I assume. But we didn’t mentally convert the letters to numbers and you sometimes see all letter numbers. For example, you can get (or could 20 years ago) the Holiday Inn in Evanston, IL, but dialing EVANSTOn (you could even dial the “n”; it would be ignored).
We were Pioneer 8 (PI8) growing up in upstate NY in the '60’s and as a kid I remembered people giving out their numbers with PI but never using “Pioneer”. One day in the '70’s one of us discovered we didn’t have to dial the PI part of the number when calling other PI8 people. From that point on it was nothing but optimized 5 digit dialing.
The old electromechanical telephone switches had lots of very clever design tricks (many of which were unique to a particular installation) to reduce the number of parts needed.
The exchange where I grew up would let you make same-exchange calls with 5 digits, and all local calls could be dialed with 6 digits. Any toll calls were 1 + 7 digits or 1 + 10 digits, and an operator would come on the line to ask you what your (calling) number was, for billing purposes.
Any of the optional leading digits for local calls could be repeatedly dialed without affecting the call at all - for example, if I was calling 835-2368, I could dial it as 35-2368, or 88888835-2368 - the switch simply discarded the leading digit(s).
This persisted into the late 70’s, when the electromechanical switch was finally replaced with a 5ESS RSM. The reason for the changeover was purely technical - the existing setup only supported 3 1000’s groups in the central office because the other groups would start with a digit in use for a neighboring exchange.
I thought this was about asking a girl for her number, and writing it on a strip of paper. Or maybe your palm.
Nowadays you just touch each other’s personal phone.
Two of the main exchanges in the area I where I grew up were EMpire and STate. Taken together, these would seem to be two good names for somewhere in New York. Actually, these were in the San Fernando Valley, a part of Los Angeles.
In the 1950’s our phone number was EMpire 2-5610. Sometime in the early 1960’s we got it changed to STate 6-8948. Yes, numbers in that format were easier to remember. They couldn’t really switch to straight 7 digits until all (or most) of the customers got their mandatory memory upgrades.
I lived in Honolulu in 1966/1967, where local phone numbers still had only 6 digits, and some only had 5. I never understood how a system could work where not all numbers were at least the same number of digits.
In Danville VA. in 1950, my grandmother’s phone number was 6089J. But, you had to ask the operator to connect you. Dials came in a few years later.
In 1947, in Arlington VA where I lived, our phone was JEfferson 2-5078. So, in elementary school every year, when you gave your phone number, it was JE2-5078. It was a dial phone I’m pretty sure. Don’t remember when it became 532-5078
Originally exchanges were places, not just mnemonic aids. Before 1923, all calls in Chicago were made by telling the operator “Calumet 412 please.” Exchanges were originally thought of as buildings, with specific locations, rather than mere groupings of telephone numbers, and the names usually related to the neighborhood or street.
When subscriber dialing was introduced in the 1920s, the users dialed the first three letters of the exchange name using the letters on the phone dial, followed by the four numbers for the specific line to ring. So the three-digit numbers represented by the names now had to be distinctive. That still left some room for creativity, but new exchanges in growing areas often needed to use letters that didn’t suggest anything very local.
In 1948, Chicago shifted to “2 + 5” dialing, already in use in some other big cities and becoming a Bell System standard. To make the conversion easy, the third digit was kept the same wherever possible. So if your number had previously been HARrison 7186, now it was HA7-7186, since the R dials 7 anyway. In some places this wasn’t possible, and more importantly, new third digits could be introduced to expand capacity. This site on the history of exchange names lists some of the “standard” exchange names used nationwide when new exchanges were introduced.
Eventually that system also reached its limits: you can’t spell anything for a number beginning with 95 or a few other combinations. All-number dialing was the standard for new phone numbers by the 1970s, but since the phone book only reset entries that needed to be changed, the Chicago phone book still listed old-style numbers until the early 1980s.
Southern Pacific Railroad used to have a large freight yard next to the L.A. River, more or less east of where Chinatown is today and going back almost to when the railroads reached the city. I remember reading somewhere that they had the second phone in the area and the phone number was 2.
Just 2.
I know my grandparent’s number had an exchange name with three digits in the forties. I wasn’t born yet, but I found sme papers of my grandfather’s on which his number was printed. By the time I was old enugh to memorizeheir number, the phone company had put a zero in front of the three digits. This was in suburban Chicago.
A lot of exchange names were generic and didn’t have any real association with the communities they were used in. That wasn’t always the case though, like with HO that I mentioned upthread, and many NYC exchanges do seem to have been concentrated in the neighborhoods they were named for, like MUrray Hill, Bensonhurst, Yorkville, and many more I’m sure.
I remember those! Is this actually the original meaning of the word ‘pog’? About 20 years ago collecting pogs was a huge fad among kids in primary school age, although what they collected had various colors and designs. They were about that size, though.
How to use a dial phone, a 1927 silent movie with animation.
Dial Comes to Town. Crotchety ol’ Gramps bitches about progress.
When I was a young kid the number on the ranch was 23f11. The numbers stood for 23 farmers line, 11 phone.
About 1956 or so we got our Pacific Telephone phone. The numbers were 5 digits. When PT&T and AT&T need more numbers they went to 7 digits, but because it would easier to remember an name and 5 digits. PA (standing for Parkway) was added to all numbers in our area.
ETA: I meant, the house had that same CR5- or 275- number through all the time my parents lived there, but I wasn’t nearly done growing up when we changed over to using just numbers, around the same time as everyone else.
Wasn’t that a party line? I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that party line numbers ended in a letter. After dialing technology came in, did your grandparents continue to have that same number, and would you simply dial the ‘J’ as a ‘5’? If so I’d bet my life that nobody on that party line had a number ending in K or L.
You still see this with some commercial or public service related 800 numbers. Twenty years ago or so I remember seeing PSAs on TV urging drug addicts to dial 800-2 GET HELP.