Re: What are one-nine-hundred numbers?

On Oct 11, 2:40 pm, R H Draney <dadoc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Evan Kirshenbaum filted:



To get a long-distance call over a dial telephone the subscriber
first must reach a girl operator at the exchange by dialing
"Operator," just as when seeking information he must dial "411."
If the girls who ordinarily answer these dialed summonses do not
cross picket lines the subscriber is stumped. [_NY Times_,
1/11/1946]

Note that this is *before* the creation of the North American
Numbering Plan and about five years before anybody dialed a phone
number including an area code.

But not so long ago that telephone operators were assumed by default to be
male...when did *that* little sea-change take place, anyway?...r

--
Lindsay Lohan died for your sins.

Way before I was born, all operators were female. Wayyyyy before I
was born; almost from the beginning. Men were not known on
switchboards until, oh, early '70s? Except the time in 1967 or '68
when everybody at the phone company went on strike!

Area codes were set up in . . . 1944, IIRC. Only operators could use
them, though, until several requirements were met -- all phones had to
have the same number of digits, exchanges within an area had to have
different digits, the machinery had to be able to figure out the
charge by itself. When inidividuals were first able to dial their own
long-distance calls, there was no "1" to start; in the places where it
was available, it was Direct Distance Dialing; the machinery knew to
connect to the long-distance system and wait for 10 digits (instead of
7 or fewer) when the second digit it was given was a "1" or a "0."
After the phone company had managed to replace all the old instruments
that sent a phantom 1 as the first digit, the "1" to connect to the
long-distance system began.

In 1950, the phone company figured the system as it was then would do
for 50 years; they came close! They had to implement area codes that
did not have "1" or "0" as the middle digit in 1995. "800" for toll-
free got overloaded before that, and "877" was added. One or two more
have been added since.

The "11x" numbers were for internal phone company use, operator to
operator or repairman to operator. That had been so for some time
according to the mention of it I found in journals from around 1945.

This is pretty good! http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/51trans.html
Has less detail than I found in university libraries a few years ago
when I got curious. :-)

BTW: ever wonder why so many TV characters have telephone numbers
beginning with "555"?

Cece

.

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