Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Loved Leo’s dissection of the confused, alarmist FBI message. Watching the video version is worth it for his facial expressions while he does that item.
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Dicky D,s after hours reminisced about early phone numbers. Mine was four digits. I never forget it, Gram drilled it into this first graders head.
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That’s nothing, at his peak at TWiT, he has also has done clever impersonations and told us not to be alarmed.
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I wonder if anyone remembers alpha numeric phone numbers. It wasn’t really any different from the current 7 digit format - it was just that the first 2 digits were told as letters instead of numbers. So a 456 prefix would have been something like GL6. I don’t know if they did that at places other than the PNW, but I do remember TV ads giving out phones numbers thusly. I wonder what was the reason.
Wouldn’t that just be to aid memory? A bit like the 888-ASK-LEO? I grew up in the UK and the phones did not have the letters on the dial/number pad so it puzzled me why there were letters at all.
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Yeah that’s probably right. It seems like in the early days, prefixes had few enough numbers associated with them that they were particular to one locality, so now I’m thinking that the letters would have stood for a certain city/town… I can’t remember what mine would have been… I was in Bellevue, WA at the time, but I don’t think our prefix letters had B in them or anything like that.
From what I can remember from what I’ve read about telecoms history, the area code letters did originally spell out the first fire characters of the area or exchange name. This would become less likely as more exchanges came online to serve areas.
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If you go back far enough, phones in the UK did have letters as well as numbers on the dial surround. Numbers in metropolitan areas were often in the format 3 alpha + 4 numeric, the 3 alpha being the first 3 letters of the exchange name which were capitalised when written out. For example, the number for the Metropolitan Police headquarters Scotland Yard was WHItehall 1212, on the Whitehall exchange.
The system was done away with in the 1960s and replaced with all figure phone numbers, to increase the quantity of numbers that could be allocated. Wikipedia has an article on it:
Here’s an alphanumeric British phone dial:
They began to run out of 3 alpha combinations that could be tied to place names quite early on in London, so there were quite a few exchanges with generic names like Ambassador, Diligence, Jubilee and so on.
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