fisher@minster.york.ac.uk (11/08/90)
> St Helena (290) has three digit numbers!
A pedant could claim that the Vatican City State has even shorter
telephone numbers - viz. zero digits long. The country code is +39
66982, and the "country" has only one telephone number, which is: .
Tony Fisher
Dept. of Computer Science, The University of York, York YO1 5DD, U.K.
Tel. +44 904 432738 or 432722
Janet: fisher@uk.ac.york.minster
Internet: fisher%minster.york.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
UUCP: fisher@minster.UUCP (..!uunet!mcsun!reading!minster!fisher)carroll@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Jeff Carroll) (11/21/90)
In article <14511@accuvax.nwu.edu> fisher@minster.york.ac.uk writes: >A pedant could claim that the Vatican City State has even shorter >telephone numbers - viz. zero digits long. The country code is +39 >66982, and the "country" has only one telephone number, which is: . I've been to St. Peter's (just last summer, in fact), and although I don't explicitly remember, I refuse to believe that there's only one phone in the whole place. What am I failing to understand? Jeff Carroll carroll@atc.boeing.com [Moderator's Note: It is not as though there 'is only one phone in the whole place'. What we have here is a situation where an institution, i.e. the Vatican, has a main listed telephone number on the Rome, Italy phone exchange. Due to the politics involved, the Vatican is considered a separate country, or nation; a place independent of Rome. They are not independent of the local telco, except on paper! So their phone number (the main listed one) becomes simultaneously their country and city code, in order to standardize the Vatican with every other 'country' in the world. They have a PBX-style system with operators on duty to handle the traffic arriving at their combination phone number/country-city code. They have many, many actual phone instruments connected to their internal PBX. PAT]