Hacker News Reader

Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Fun trivia about rotary phones: it takes longer to dial higher digits (0 taking the longest), so major cities (more people, more calls) got lower area codes like 212 (Manhattan) vs 307 (Cheyenne, Wyoming).

The general idea is like Huffman coding.

View on HN

And the middle digit was the biggest factor in dialing length, because before 1995 is was required to be 0 or 1. But the fastest "0" area code (202, Washington DC) was still two pulses faster than the slowest "1" area code (916, northern California.)

Personal trivia... I once lived in area code 909, which was the worst of the rotary-dial era.

909 was not established though until well after the rotary-dial era was over, I had a rotary phone in the 90's and was calling 909 numbers, but I was a distinct minority.

I grew up with area code 809, which is for the caribbean, almost as bad a yours by 1 pulse.

Guess they didn't get the memo when they gave Houston 713 (though that used to cover a large area of Texas, so perhaps Houston had a much smaller rank then)

It did. That's why Pittsburgh is 412, we were one of the largest in the country when these were dolled out.

I guess since the move to touch tone phones being common was around the time cities like Houston grew it wasn't an issue anyone felt needed to be fixed.

Indeed - as of the 1940 census (area codes went live in 1947), Houston was #21 whereas Pittsburgh was #10

https://www.biggestuscities.com/1940

Reply on news.ycombinator.com