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Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on rotary phones in the 80s. Though I havent touched one in over 30 years, I still remember the distinctive feel of the rotary dial, it certainly had its own character but it was quite tedious to call another number, especially a number with high digits. In the 90s they were removed from my area but they were still touch dials translated to pulses. It felt a lot more modern but it would still take longer to dial high digits. I remember having a repertoire of 40-50 phone numbers that I had commited to memory. I still remember a few which I still use now in passwords:)

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I remember when I heard the rationale¹ for the assignments of area codes in North America: Populated areas with a high subscriber count would get the lowest codes to reduce the number of pulses required. Hence 212 for New York, 213 for Los Angeles, and 312 for Chicago.

My next thought was self-pity. My area had just been assigned a new code: 909. The absolute worst code possible². 28 pulses required for us bumpkins while only 6 were needed for the cool people in the city. :)

[1] There's a good Underunderstood episode on this. Apparently it's not exactly certain this was the rationale. No memo exists detailing it, but it matches up pretty well with how they were initially assigned. (https://underunderstood.com/podcast/episode/area-code-conspi...)

[2] Well, I guess 900 is actually worse, but that's not a geographical area code.

Populated areas with a high subscriber count would get the lowest codes to reduce the number of pulses required

This is true, but there was also a bit of politics.

New Jersey got the lowest/first in order area code (201) because that's where Bell headquarters was.

And since Washington, DC was the capitol, it got the next number in line: 202.

Only very rarely are area codes tinkered with in this manner. The only other one I can think of is 321 for the area around Cape Canaveral.

I wonder if they came up with some of the plan to backfit the political considerations. NJ getting 201 and DC getting 202 fits with the numbering scheme, in that codes assigned to entire states (or district as is the case with DC) had a middle "0", whereas states with more than one code got numbers with a middle "1".

Was New Jersey the most populous state to only receive one code?

> Only very rarely are area codes tinkered with in this manner. The only other one I can think of is 321 for the area around Cape Canaveral.

That's awesome. It would have been a crime to pass that opportunity up.

I always thought it was particularly cruel that all emergency services (police, fire, ambulance) in my country were reached by dialing 000. It doesn't doesn't make much difference now, but imagine waiting for that rotary dial to spin all the way back around while your house is going up in flames around you...

I think in (most?) Europe is 112 since forever exactly because rotary phones.

(checking wikipedia [1] ...)

TIL It was also to permit physically blocking all the other numbers in public access rotary phones while leaving emergency calls enabled. Smart.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_numbe...

In British Columbia, 112 was once the prefix for making long-distance calls. That changed in 1985 to bring us into conformity with the rest of North America.

Edit: also, you could call for free on rotary pay phones by tapping out the number on the "hangup" switch.

In the late 80s I was messing with a rotary phone hook switch and dialed 117 accidentally, which was the proctor test set. It was an automated phone testing platform, and it would let you test things like the coin receiver and touchtone tones, among other things.

I never had the coin sound maker, but I did have a small transcription digital recorder years later that could trick the proctor test set into thinking a nickel had been inserted.

I don't remember all the other tests, hopefully there's a webpage somewhere about it.

In France main numbers for emergencies are still 15, 17 and 18. The 112 redirects on these.

Back then you never needed to dial your own area code unless you traveled far away and called home. At least not where I lived. So it’s no skin off your back that it took the better part of three seconds to dial your area code at ten pulses per second.

Back then you never needed to dial your own area code unless you traveled far away and called home.

Back when there were lots and lots of small local telephone companies within a single area code, where I lived you didn't have to even dial all seven numbers.

As long as you were calling within the same phone company, you only needed the last five digits. So calling the neighbor across the street was just 2-3342. But calling someone you knew who was a mile away in a different phone company, you had to do the whole 867-5309. There were some people you knew who lived across the border in another state, and for most of them you had to dial all 11 digits.

But some of the small phone companies operated on both sides of the state line, so you could still dial people with 9-9845, even though they were in a different area code in a different state.

It was also billed as a local call, which made the BBS I ran the main e-mail exchange point between those two area codes for the store-and-forward BBS network I belonged to.

I was mostly joking about the envy of lower codes. DTMF had long replaced pulse dialing when the 909 NPA was created. Still supported, but even my grandparents had touch-tone phones.

I recall as a kid thinking it seemed ridiculous for there to be a specific monthly surcharge to allow TouchTone dialing. (I also learned that you could drop the service and TouchTone dialing would still work, so it really felt like they were just taking money from people too ill-informed to make a good decision.)

It was ridiculous. I learned from 2600 that apparently telcos needed to upgrade their switches (or some other thing) just to be able to distinguish who had touch tone phone service from rotary.

You could use this to your advantage as well, for instance in a phone booth or with a coin op phone in a bar by simply breaking the circuit with the hook in the rhythm of the dialing pulses. Free calls!

it was quite tedious to call another number

Just as an aside, the reason the UK uses 999 as the emergency number is because it was much quicker to dial on a rotary phone.

That's not correct. 1 is the closest to the stop on a UK rotary phone. You can see photos and videos of the diallers on my blog post https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/why-didnt-phonewords-take-o...

9 is almost the furthest away from the stop - 0 is further.

999 was chosen because it was less likely that interference would generate the exact same sequence of pulses. https://web.archive.org/web/20090302014433/http://www.btplc....

In Italy emergency numbers were usually 112 or 113, it was common enough that telephones were prevented from dialing other numbers by putting a lock on #3, but emergency could still be called, see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28273160

It's 110 in Germany. The 1's are quick to dial and the 0 a good confirmation.

My understanding of the reason was to reduce the likelihood of phone lines swaying in the wind tapping out eg 111 autonomously.

How is 9 quicker to dial than 1?

The UK phones started with 9 and worked downwards.

Really? I can find plenty of pics of vintage GPO phones online but none of them work like that

Here's one:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Ne...

It's from New Zealand, but they drive on the same side of the road as the UK ))

Then they should have rotated the dials counter-clockwise.

Hmmm... except the emergency number in NZ is 111

Which phone numbers do you remember?

0891 50 50 50 is stuck in my head. I still have no clue what it's for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1S5BvsTNSQ

If from the UK, I'd bet on 01 811 8181

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