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I hated rotary phones. It took forever to dial a number.
But it’s also why heavily populated areas have certain area codes. These numbers were just faster to dial. For instance:
Generally, if the area code took less time to dial, odds are it’s an urban code. The emergent pattern is when middle digit is 1 or 2. Like 816 for KCMO or 918 for Tulsa or 416 for Toronto.
And if it featured higher digits or a zero, it was probably rural. Area Code 907 was established in 1957 for almost all of Alaska. That’s 26 total pulses. 906 is for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and was put into service in 1961 after splitting off from 616, which services Grand Rapids.
Many of the high digit urban area codes were put into use after touch tone dialing became widespread since any number took just as long as any other to dial.
One thing I thought was funny about the way phones used to work is 5-digit dialing. So I reckon that larger towns in the area code got lower numbers as the third digit in their exchange codes because those dialed fastest, but I don’t know that for sure. What I do know is the town where I grew up has a population of about 400, and that digit is 9. The next town over is the county seat with a population of 20,000, and its original exchange codes end in 1 and 2.
TIL, thank you for that!
Also, if you were in a rural area that had the LATA code (the first three numbers after the area code) on a mechanical switcher, you did not have to use the LATA code. Could just dial the last 4 digits. My dad’s farm was in a town that was still sitting on a mechanical switch until the early 2000’s so in the early 80’s we had a budget party line (we were one long ring, while the neighbors had two shorter rings and there was a third person - whom we did not know, that was a phenomenally LONG call maker - you’d sometimes have to wait an hour or so for the guy to get off the line) and all of our friends were just 4 numbers… Can remember many - 8345, 8652, 8033 (<- my best friend in 10th grade…)
It was a decidedly different, and less expensive, world.
I knew about 5-digit dialing, but never knew people used to dial only 4 digits. That’s pretty neat, and probably made life with a rotary phone much easier than people my age realize.
I’m a younger millennial so it was no big deal to grab the landline and dial 1+10 digits to call my girlfriend long distance in 2009. On a rotary phone, it’d probably have taken til supper just to dial lol
I did find a rotary phone in a box at my great grandmother’s house once and played with it because it was fascinating to me. Then I dialed a random 800 number on it and remarked that it was kinda amazing that so many people bought things over the telephone in the day.
Yup… the trick was having your LATA code be on the mechanical switcher. They could address 9,999 numbers. Which in a town that at the time had maybe 1,900 people… it was glorious.
Having to dial 911 in an actual emergency was the most harrowing experience ever. Waiting for the 9 to spin down made you feel like your heart would explode. Even worse if you jumped the gun on the following 1 and had to start over. Or you could dial the operator with a single 0, but that was a risky move in the late 80’s/early 90’s when operator services were being wound down.
And towards the end there, operators went from super helpful to kind of mean
Kind of mean may have been relative to the area. In my major metropolitan area, some of them were veritable assholes.
They were phased out for a reason… When I was young everyone in the village had either 3or 4 digits in their phone number. Was very straightforward to use with these phones.