Wow, a lot of great answers; thanks. I guess I should have mentioned that I was talking strictly land-lines and that I live in Oregon where you have to dial the area code for all numbers, and that dialing a 1 is for long distance.
I lived in Ohio in the early 70’s and we could do this. We had a party line that served four houses, and you had to listen for “your ring” to know that the call was for your house. It was a trip.
Same situation here in Hotlanta. We have a bunch of area codes, then you have all the transplants who kept their home state phone numbers. You can’t assume where anyone is located by looking at their area code anymore. My home phone and cell both have different area codes, and that sometimes confuses people from less populated areas who haven’t had to deal with this problem of running out of numbers yet. We too have to dial the full 10 digits, no matter if we call next door of to another state.
In the 90s the UW-Madison phone system was still set up like that. If you lived in the dorms, you could call another on-campus phone number (26x-xxxx) by just dialing x-xxxx.
I think I read recently that they didn’t even bother wiring the newest dorms they built with POTS wiring. /Shaking fist at the kids these days with their iTwitters.
All phone numbers in Iqaluit were the same prefix (979) until the mid '90s (or so I hear). You could dial anyone in town by just dialling the last 4 digits. Now, we also have 975- numbers. People still tell others their phone numbers using just the last 4 digits; if they only give you 4 digits, the 979 is implicit. 975 people give their numbers as “5-1234”
It was the same at my school, but isn’t that more like an internal phone system, where you can just dial extensions? Didn’t you have to dial “9” to get an outside line?
I don’t remember doing that to order pizza or call friends who lived off campus, but perhaps it was just like a gigantic PBX…
I do remember when dialing long distance we had a choice of prefixes that affected how the call was billed to us…I remember dialing 8+number billed it via the University’s long distance account which was cheaper than the standard long distance service we could set up with AT&T or Sprint or whatever.
There is no regulatory requirement for the 1 for “toll calls” It all comes down to how did the phone company program its switch. Why? Dog knows … phone stuff is full of stupid.
I’ve been working on building a switch, so I’ve been looking into just such things.
If you do not require a 1 … and you dont add the 1 … and you send you call to another phone switch and/or company that requires the 1 … your call will then fail. This is the 2nd most common case.
If you require a 1 and you send the call to another phone switch and/or company that requires there not be a 1 … your call will then fail. This case is not common.
The most common case is the phone switch receiving the call doesn’t care 1 or not.
The best way to program a phone switch is to just add the one if it wasn’t dialed and it needs to be shipped off to somewhere else. Also program the switch to take incoming calls with or without the 1. Phone company’s change slowly. 
And just wait until you find out “international call blocking” doesn’t block calls to Canada, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, ect, ect.
Meflin
I’ve got to get back to some nice simple Internet Routing 
Well, no, those countries are all in the North American Numbering Plan. You’d have to block according to area code. It’s really ‘011/01’ call blocking; it blocks calls to numbers outside the NANP.
Exactly … international calling that is still NANP isn’t blocked. For the average consumer “international call blocking” they would expect … it to be well blocking international calls, but its not. How many people know this who don’t have hands on with phone stuff? Phone stuff is werid for end users.
Meflin
How hard would it be to say, “Block all 011 calls, and all calls to <list of area codes of other countries in the NANP>”?
Let’s see… I remember when our local exchange went digital and we could no longer dial within-exchange calls with 4 digits only. That would have been… about 1991. (Vermont)
Not hard at all, with the equipment I am working with. With say a Nortel/Lucent/ect Class-5 … I have no real idea. The “hard” work is keeping up on the NANP assignment list of area codes , and they have an email notification list so its not that hard. My Lucent Class-4 … is dumb as rocks … so dumb it cant do per-user call blocking of any kind, I’m using other junk for features like this, I can do database loockups for such things.
Ye Local ILEC offeres “international call blocking” if you read the online doc’s they only mention Bermuda as an example of this effect of actually being a 011 block.
Meflin
Nice to see someone who knows what NAMP is!
We studied all this when I was in electronics school (early eighties), and I’ve kept up on it a little. Mostly because of all the new area codes.
It seems like it would have to be, no? How else would the system distinguish the last five digits of an internal number from the beginning five digits of a 7-digit external number? (in other words, if the number is 332-4567, and you dial 2-4567, how does the system know you’re not really dialling 245-67xx and just waiting to remember those last two digits?)
I believe you can hit number sign (#) after dialling to signal that you’re done, but that may not be supported everywhere.
The University of Minnesota was (and likely still is) like this. Five-digit dialing on campus, but dial 9 (or was it 8?) for an outside line to call off-campus.
My hometown of Manhattan, MT had five-digit dialing within the exchange (284) until at least 1990, which is when my family moved away.
When I was a telephone operator, customers would often call with problems getting a certain number through. When they would dial the 1, the voice would say “It is not necessary to dial a 1”, and when they would leave the 1 off, the voice would say, “You must first dial a 1 before calling this number.” Very frustrating, but we were generally able to get the call through for them.
Back when I was a student at UC Berkeley in 1989, I accidentally discovered that the university phone system did not bill you for long-distance if you didn’t dial a ‘1’ before dialing the long-distance number.