ndallen@contact.uucp (Nigel Allen) (03/10/91)
In Volume 11, Issue 166, Message 6 of 12, scott@blueeyes.kines. uiuc.edu (scott) wrote: > Several years ago, I read a message on a BBS from a person who > wrote his phone number as some incredibly long string of digits > much MUCH longer than the normal ten digit telephone number). > Although I didn't actually test it out at the time, he claimed that by > dialing this incredibly long string of digits you would, in fact, reach > his phone. He found it amusing to give this long version out to > people who asked him for his phone number. As a teenager, I lived in Truro, Nova Scotia, which was served by a step-by-step central office. Telephone numbers there began either (902) 893- or (902) 895-, but you could dial 895-xxxx as 5-xxxx, and in fact some local businesses would display the five- digit numbers. I know that you couldn't direct-dial to Truro in 1969, when my family first arrived there, and the phone directory that year showed a number of manual telephone exchanges in the rural areas, which I think were operated by independent companies or cooperatives, not by Maritime Tel & Tel. Because you could dial 895-xxxx as 5-xxxx, I think the switch simply stripped off initial 8s and 9s, so that you could dial 895-xxxx as 8989898989895-xxxx. As telephone companies across North America converted small towns from four- or five-digit dialling to seven digits, many communities were probably permitted to retain their old dialling patterns, by the simple expedient of stripping off the recently-prepended initial digits. When two neigbouring communities were converted from manual to dial and became local calls from Truro, they received the exchanges 662 (Debert) and 673 (Brookfield), so that Truro residents didn't have to change their dialling patterns. (Interestingly, the Truro dial-up port for Datapac, the packet switching network operated by Canadian telephone companies, was actually a Debert number, presumably because the phone company trusted a connection through the newer Debert central office more than one terminated on the Truro switch.) Truro had long distance operators in 1969 and for some years thereafter. When direct distance dialling arrived in the early 1970's, it was initially implemented without automatic number identification, so there was seemed to be a fair amount of fraud as a result. People would simply give out someone else's number when the ONI (operator number identification) operator asked them which number they were calling from. Eventually we got ANI, and maybe at the same time or a bit later Truro lost its operators, and dialling zero got you an operator in Halifax. We had a CN Telecommunications (later CNCP Telecommunications) telegraph office at the CN train station. That closed in the the mid- 1970s, I think It's odd what things burn themselves into your memory. I can still remember the recording when some phone numbers were moved from one prefix to another in the early 1970s: ("I'm sorry, numbers beginning with 893-4 have been changed to 895-4, and numbers beginning with 893-53 have been changed to 895-53."). Nigel Allen ndallen@contact.uucp