Anyone here try dialing the radio station to request a song....on a rotary phone?
I was an expert at it back then.
Yeah...you’d know when the contests were coming up, so you’d dial five or six digits and wait. Then when the contest was announced, you’d dial the last digit or two. Stations caught on and began randomly taking the fifth or tenth caller, so that advantage went bye-bye.
I do. In fact, I can still remember the number for the radio station (WRKO) - 266 6868. That was not exactly a rotary-friendly number when you were trying to be the 7th caller for a pair of Three Dog Night tickets.
There were also radio contests that asked an obscure trivia question, such as what is Alice Cooper's real name. Now any cellar-dwelling loser can Google up that answer and speed dial a radio station in 3.2 seconds.
Speed dialing and Google killed the radio contest.
-PJ
Except that it there were only some many long distance lines, and the signalling was done in-band, and so it was more efficient to minimize the time to pulse the digits to more profitable places than others. That is, the LD lines could be turned over faster.
Hence, sending out 26 clicks to Hawaii or Alaska was a better use of LD lines than say the large populations of NYC, Chicago, or LA, which got the minimal 5, 6, and 6 respectively.
Did you dial all but the last number and then dial the last number up to the finger stop before letting it go at the right time? I would do that if they were having a contest and you had to listen for a certain signal from the radio station and be the first to dial in. Soon the radio stations got wise and made it be the 2nd, third, or 10th caller to prevent this.