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My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest „toys“ I ever got as a kid.

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In the olden days (up to about the mid-1990s!) the island of Canna off the west coast of Scotland that had a ten-subscriber phone exchange where you could dial any number on the island with a single digit. You could only make one call at a time off the island, via a VHF link on around 80MHz to the telephone exchange in Mallaig about 25 miles away.

that's incredibly cool!

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