"Uh...how big of a monkey?"
Posted on 07/20/2011 6:44:18 PM PDT by jocon307
You probably dial a few of them every day, but do you ever stop and think about the history behind a phone number? When were the first numbers introduced? How did you end up with a particular area code?
We’ve got the answers to these quandaries and more in our collection of 10 fascinating facts that you might not know about the common phone number.
(Excerpt) Read more at mashable.com ...
867-5309.
Trivia: Who belongs to that number?
My first job was a long distance operator at 185 Franklin Street in Boston.
We were still using the big board with the 1/4 inch plugs in 1970.
two longs and a short.
Y’all long lost siblings?
Re your post 24, oh, I know why they do it. It still is a spell-breaker for me. I’ve often wondered why the Hollywood bigwigs cannot arrange to have a totally unused number for their use. True, that would not solve the problem entirely since it would be repeated and repeated, but it sure would sound better than 555-2222.
I remember when you couldn’t dial a long distance number yourself, you had to call the operator by dialing “0”. Then you told the her (I never personally spoke to a male operator though I suppose there were some) who you wanted to call and in which city and state they were. Then you might have to hang up to wait for a call back when she got the person on the line.
I remember answering the phone when I was kid and the operator was would say she had a long distance call for my father. If he wasn’t home, she would leave a message with me to have him call “operator 3”. Then when he got home, he would dial “0”, ask for “operator 3”, who would then get the other party on the line for him and the other party still paid for the call.
>>I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed it!<<
Interesting, huh?
I was telcom manager at a major So Cal University for a while and learned all kinds of interesting stuff. Telcom lore is a lot of fun and more arcane than people know.
I still have, and can use, a toner to backtrack wiring — as well as Fluke meter to do distance, impedance and the like.
In the twenties my grandmother worked as a telephone operator in Ontario plugging in those cords and making connections.
After high school she had wanted to go to college for nursing, but her father wouldn’t pay for it. So, she got a job as an telephone operator. She loved that job, because she had some independence.
She worked for the phone company until she married the boy next door in 1927, when she was twenty-one years old.
Jenny Jenny
"Uh...how big of a monkey?"
Actually, ‘1’ is the country code for the USA & Canada. The dialed preface ‘1’ instructs the end office switch (the one serving your house) to open a path to the toll switch (back in the days when LD calls were metered (charged by the minute.) which then routes the call inside the US & Canada.
If you dialed a ‘0’ first, the switch then knew it was an international call. In older times, it immediately prompted an international operator to pick up. Now it is all direct dialed.
The above information applied prior to the days of Number Portability which was mandated in the late 90’s.
As for the Exchanges (Klondike, et al.), these were the end offices in the neighborhood you live in. When I was a child we lived in the Lockheed section of Oakland. All phone numbers began with LO(X)-XXXX. When switch routing tables evolved, the geographical exchanges were dropped and they all went numerical.
My aunt had a party line in rural MI in the early eighties. When I was a child and I would visit, she would always re-teach me the rules about her phone and about how party lines were not necessarily private, but we must try to follow the rules and not interfere on another person’s call.
I never knew any another person who had a party line.
She lived so far out in the country, though. All of her family lived hours away. Whenever I was there, I didn’t notice the phone ringing that much.
Now, with free long distance and cellphones, our lives are constantly interrupted by the phone.
We had a crank phone mounted high on the wall with 12 parties - our ring was also two longs and one short. Whenever anyone’s number was rung by the operator, if you were the one who had been called, once you answered you could hear the click of everyone else picking up. Our own 1940-1950 version of Facebook. If you weren’t home for a while, you could always ring up the operator and find out if anyone tried to call you and catch up on all the gossip. Then we had dial phones. Two prefixes in our area - you had Sunset8- if you lived in a farming area, Cypress9- if you lived in the city. You always knew where someone lived by their phone prefix. This later turned into 788- and 299- We still had a party line but it was only 3, not 12, because it was less expensive. My mom hated the fact that we had no operator who kept up with all the goings on. Then we had push button phones with what my dad claimed was a waste because of all those extra buttons like the * and # which would never be used for anything. Seems like at least until the 80’s you could still tell what area someone lived in because of their prefix. With the advent of the fax machine and cell phone they began running out of numbers and started the overlay and it’s been a mess ever since.
>>Actually, ‘1’ is the country code for the USA & Canada. <<
Sorry I wasn’t clear — the “1” in the exchange preceded country codes.
That is why we de-facto settled on “1” for USA and Canada — most phones in the world were in those countries and the switching hardware were already wired to react to “1”
When my son was born, rotary phones were fast disappearing. I was talking about buying one of those phones for my son to play with, with the rotary dial. My mother told me to get one that looked more like a cordless phone. She said that he would look at me talking on my cordless phone and know that his plastic toy was “his phone”, like mine. She was a smart grandmother, because she knew how much toddlers mimic and model their behavior after their parents.
Think about what you just said. If you were a child of the 60’s thru the 80’s could you have envisioned wireless technology, hands-free dialing/talking, movies on your phone, the internet, conferencing calling, caller ID, picture phones, etc. How about starting your car from across the planet.
I’d say were a pretty close to the phone of the future, wouldn’t you?
It was truly a different world 30 years ago.
The decimal system is running out of unique telephone numbers, which is why international authorities are exploring the 12 digit system.
Best laugh I’ve had for a while! Thx!
It made dating interesting ;-)
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