I keep calling my Congressman asking to stop runaway spending and the phone just rings and rings!
Check out these interesting facts about phone numbers, area codes, etc.
For example the NJ area code 201 was the very first one, yay Jersey!
Maybe I'm drawn to post this since I've spent so much time on the phone lately calling DC (area code 202!)
Two longs and a short.
I’ve always disliked that phony-baloney 555 exchange number. Whenever I hear it in a drama it somehow breaks the spell of the suspension of belief and you acutely realize that it’s all fakery before your eyes.
I wish they explained why, in the old days, people would call the operator and saw things like “Klondike 558”, etc. Any Freeper know why?
A benefit of having Bell Laboratories located in Murray Hill.
For example, when I was little, I remember people referring to my home phone number as "Highland 4, w, x, y, z," where the exchange was "444." Sometimes the "Highland 4" was abbreviated as "HI 4." I also remember "Delmar 3" or "DE 3" for "333," and "Niagra 2" (NI 2) for "642."
I wonder where that came from. But then, I also remember when we had a party line too.
Mark
They left out a few singularly phascinating phone phacts.
1) Early phone keys are reverse from 10-key — phones go from top to bottom where as 10 keys go from bottom to top.
Why?
Well, like typewriters, which shuffled the keys so the arms wouldn’t jam, the designers of the first digital phones were worried that 10 key operators would overwhelm the ability to process the input.
2) “1” in the initial entry code told the (then-analog) switches that this would be a call outside of the area. Thus, the older area codes had an embedded “1” — 213, 818, 212, 617, 312, etc.
It is now an anachronistic standard that calls outside (or sometimes inside) the area begin with “1” — it tells the switch that there will be a call outside of the immediate area. For massive areas, such as the L.A. 818 area, it was just easier to require the code and handle all calls as if out of the area.
TW32938 I was 5 years old. I’m 58 now. Lived in Westminster, CA at the time.
I keep calling my Congressman asking to stop runaway spending and the phone just rings and rings!
GA(rfield) 6-1000 or ME(tcalf) 3-1000
No, but I've sometimes found myself wondering what ingredient it is that makes that glop on stadium nachos the exact same color as those yellow plastic seats you see in places like bus stations.
Boyd Franks, a physicist and worker in the ITT lab, invented the redial. He lives in a small town in NE Mississippi.
"I love wrong numbers."
My daughter has a toy rotary phone. I recently asked a 20 yr old who saw the toy if she knew how to operate such a device. I had to explain how it worked. (Though the toy did not have an actual finger stop near the 3 o’clock position.)
Our old phone number was 147-M, and it was two rings on a party line. (old. This makes me feel REEEEALY old...)
867-5309.
Trivia: Who belongs to that number?
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.