@89th said in Noob Phone Q:
Yeah and it’s so old yours is only 6 digits!
https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/91/
City telephone networks came into being and every phone set was assigned a number. Calling a subscriber would require giving his or her number to the hello girl.
In 1910 the USA, then a country with the highest telephone penetration rate, numbered over 7 million subscribers, which compared to Russia’s 155,000. In the days of old an ordinary telephone number had four digits, while large cities used five-digit numbers. To reach a person beyond city bounds by phone, you would normally have to tell the operator the name of the city and a number. A telephone call used to be pre-ordered, which took some waiting.
In the 1910s automatic telephone switches started to supersede hello girls who made connections manually. By the beginning of the First World War the USA had over 100 automatic telephone switches, Germany—7, Great Britain—2. Moscow saw the first automatic telephone switch installed not sooner than in 1924, and that one was in the Kremlin. The city automatic telephone switch started operation in 1930.
How they did it
Americans who were to encounter the problem of 7-digit numbers sooner that any other nation, found a mnemonic solution to the problem (it was generally believed back then that 7-digit numbers were hard to memorize): the first three digits were replaced with letters some word started with. For technical reasons no telephone number in the US started with 1. For historical reasons zero was always used to call the operator. As a result, any American telephone number could start with any figure but 1 and 0.
Mnemonic rules were in use in London and Paris until mid-1960s. At first Americans adopted the LLL-NNNN format (three letters, four numerals). After becoming aware that it was running out of words beginning with the needed three letters, New York introduced the LLN-NNNN format in 1930 with all the other cities following suit in 1947–48.
