Comments on: 1950s AT&T film: How to dial your phone

By: Major Variola (ret)

Major Variola (ret) — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Someone needs to describe TCP/IP
that way. First, we listen() then we
get a SYN… must use same accent hair
and dress.

PS what kind of resolution did they have
on the “this phone’s number” display
on the dial? Looks monochrome…

Isn’t there a pinch hazard here?

@Anon: witch: hilarious

If you pick up you might hear voices? WTF? Cell phones were invented to give
street schizos cover for talking to themselves.

WHY IS IT “DIAL TONE” AND NEVER “THE DIAL TONE” ????

When she says “four digits that make up your number” she omits the dots between the digits.

I like how she ends with “RTFM”

By: emmdeeaych

emmdeeaych — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Strange but true: I have Verizon FiOS service, fiber to the house, and for some reason the darned thing still works with my ancient rotary dial phone. Stop to think about that. Someone at Verizon decided to encode the pulse-recognition into the fiber optic boxes. So weird, but I do love the tactile sense of that heavy old handset.

By: rebdav

rebdav — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The continuing backwards compatibility of pulse dialing is useful if there is an issue with the touch tone system on your phone, you can tap out the numbers in pulse with the hangup. It is mostly a party trick though and easy enough to get wrong.
I like the old school cold war nuke resistant standards for old copper pair telephony and even though there are cheaper alternatives keep a standard wired line because of the durability and ease of DIY improvisation.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

still have my metal ball top dialing pen. just in case.

By: silkox

silkox — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

In my area, at least, there was a time when you just dialed the last 4 digits of the number — you didn’t need the exchange (DIamond-6, for us) until later. This was after the period when we had a party line, and could tell which house the incoming call was for by the ring pattern. Now we have to dial all 10 digits, even for a call across the street.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My great aunt had one of those bakelite phones; as a little kid it seemed ridiculously huge.

Regarding the decision to employ the numeral ‘oh’, it seems to me a pretty good call.

Consider the certainty that folks would say ‘oh’ meaning zero anyway, and the pains taken in the video to handle the ambiguity make sense.

By: Wickedashtray

Wickedashtray — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Up until the late ’60′s, you had to lease those phones from Ma Bell. They were made of heavy Bakelite and you could bludgeon someone to death with just the hand-piece. They were built like tanks.

I also remember getting really annoyed when someone had a lot of “zeroes” in their home phone number.

By: emmdeeaych

emmdeeaych — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not that hard, I’ve called Australia by interrupting the autodialer and then tapping out the number from a phone at a rural kiosk ATM in the middle of the night. Thanks BayBank!

By: adamnvillani

adamnvillani — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve heard that young people these days are unfamiliar with busy signals.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have explained to an 18 year old just this year, what a busy signal is.

By: robcat2075

robcat2075 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Telephone monopoly attempts to calm populace before robot takeover.

By: tyger11

tyger11 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What is that accent she’s using? You hear that accent in a lot of movies from the era, but not anymore.

So, she says there will always be an operator available, for any type of problem with calling. Does this mean we’ll have lots of types of problems calling? I don’t like the sound of that.

No sir, I don’t like the sound of that at ALL.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I miss rotary dial phones and operators. I remember my high schools friends and I were playing the game ‘killer’ where you try to assassinate one another with dart guns. I made had to make an emergency break through to a friend of mine to tell them that another friend had been assassinated. After describing to that friend the assassination in gruesome detail, we both heard a screen as the operator hung up the phone. Good times.

By: The Dour Salmon

The Dour Salmon — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Having both an O and a 0 referred to as “oh” is fantastically complicated. As much fun as having some letters in a phone number, numbers are just far less confusing.

@Tyger11: It’s called the Mid-Atlantic or Trans-Atlantic accent. Here’s the good ol’ wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It sounds like a mild form of the Trans-Atlantic accent. It was meant to be a neutral accent that didn’t fraw too much attention to itself while also not favoring any specific real world accent. The idea was that people in different regions and even different nations that speak English would be able to understand it easily.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I grew up with rotary phones, too, but until today never realized that the confusion between the letter O and number 0 is that much worse because it is the number 0 you dialed to get the operator.

By: vicmonster

vicmonster — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My mom’s original phone number growing up was 44. Her mother got confused when they changed it to BE44. Myself, growing up in the mid 70′s had an aunt who lived down the street who still had the BL4 prefix. We had a party line with nearly 20 homes on it, so you often had to wait quite a while to get a line, or interrupt their conversation; though my grandmother liked to listen in.
What gets me is calling internationally from the office when you are in a hurry. 9-011-country code-city code-number…especially central New Delhi, where the country code is 91 and the city code is 1. I have accidentally connected with my local 911 operator when I had bad reception on more than one occasion.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

What a odd looking phone. how do you txt with that?

By: Mr. Winka

Mr. Winka — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I love the emphasis on writing down the number as she describes how not doing so could annoy someone else with a very concerned look on her face.

The “numeral Oh”? Couldn’t people in the 50′s handle zero?

I’m sure the reason the phone company tried to train the public on using phones (let it ring for 1 minute, don’t accidentally dial the wrong number) was it costs them money to connect and ring a phone that they couldn’t bill for or bill much for in a small percentage of cases.

My family would always used a system to communicate things for free using the phone like “let it ring once when you get home”.

By: wrybread

wrybread — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a ne’er do well 13 year old “phreaker” in the early 80s we used to do “99xx scans” on every exchange to find the weird phone company utilities installed on various 99xx numbers. There were lots of really strange things there, my favorite being two different numbers that would connect to each other. So for example there’d be 914-478-9911 and 914-478 9912, and you’d call the first and just get silence, and when someone called the second they’d be patched in. Weird stuff, and hugely exciting to a 13 year old.

By: Stefan Jones

Stefan Jones — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m old enough to remember when phone numbers were routinely listed and given in (two letter exchange)-(digit)-(four digit format).

To make things weirder, the exchange letters were given names, so:

OR6-5458

Was also known as “Oriole 6-5458″

MAD Magazine occasionally ran gag telephone directories, say of fictional characters, where the exchange names were “appropriate.”

However . . . even as a little kid I memorized my home phone number as a string of numbers. The whole letter thing was confusing.

By: Jake0748

Jake0748 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite phone # – BR-549.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Witch!

By: Urban Garlic

Urban Garlic — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Seems like a human factors failure, conflating the letter “o” and the numeral “o” in the demonstration number WO4-9970, and then laboriously distinguishing them later. Something’s wrong with zero?

Also, “let the phone ring for about a minute, or about ten rings.” Wow. No answering machines, I suppose, and only one telephone in the house, but still, that’s a heck of a long time.

I recall from 1950s movies that “Quigly” was commonly-used two-letter exchange, because there’s no “Q” on the telephone dial, so there’s no risk of it corresponding to a real exchange name — it’s the predecessor of 555-1212.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My grandparent’s phone number still starts with DE2. (that is how I learned and and still call it) I believe it was for Delemont

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Area codes were assigned so that the largest cities had the quickest codes to dial (NYC=212, LA=213, Chicago=312). Area codes containing zeroes were only assigned to relatively rural regions.

By: Gag Halfrunt

Gag Halfrunt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, remember that there might have been only one phone in the house. You’d hear the phone ring but you might not get to it in time if the caller got impatient and hung up. And with no answering machines and no caller ID, you would just have to wait for the caller to phone you again.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The discussions about the “555″ prefix and payphones made me think that movie producers should use numbers from a pool of payphone numbers. There shouldn’t be much cost in idiots dialling payphones to see if it actually goes to the place described on film.

By: jackie31337

jackie31337 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had no idea the concept of dialing your own phone was so relatively recent. I remember using rotary phones, but they seem really ancient to me now.

I did always wonder why there were letters on the phone–it seemed like they were only there so 1-800 numbers could spell words. I never knew there was a time when regular phone numbers contained letters. Could they possibly have made dialing any more complicated for people who weren’t used to it? I wonder when they dropped the central office letters and replaced them with numbers.

By: gradv

gradv — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Is that free personal numbers directory still available?