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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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