david@cs.uow.edu.au (David E A Wilson) (06/15/90)
In Australia, our Telecom supplied phones do not have letters on the dial so we do not have companies using words as phone numbers. I thought that we must never have had letters on our dials. This turns out to be untrue. Yesterday I dropped in at the local library and had a look through the old telephone books (I only looked at 1960's & 70's). Back in the early 60's we did have letters on our dials - and in a pattern I have not seen mentioned before. The layout was as follows [1 = 1 pulse, 0 = 10 pulses]: 1 = A 2 = B 3 = F 4 = J 5 = L 6 = M 7 = U 8 = W 9 = X 0 = Y Has this scheme been used anywhere else in the world? Why were these particular letters chosen? In the Wollongong exchange district in 1961, only five out of fifteen exchanges were automatic. The Wollongong exchange had five digit numbers with the first digit represented by the letter from the above table. Other exchanges had either three or five digit numbers for the automatic exchanges or one to three digit mixed length numbers on the manual exchanges. Some of the manual exchanges had numbers like 436-D & 436-U (at a guess a party line) and one had 52-S. My favourite was the Dunmore exchange - one digit numbers and four subscribers. By the early 70's the letters had gone and Wollongong was converted to six digit numbers by about 1973 [we still have six digit numbers but I have heard we may need to go to seven digits in the not to distant future]. It is quite astounding to see the growth that has occured in my lifetime - in 1961 the phone book covered an area now in six books about twice the size and thickness of the 1961 issue. The biggest growth is in the Yellow Pages - the 1990 edition has 264 white & 760 yellow pages. The old books even had instructions on how to dial - a skill some Americans have lost since the introduction of push button phones a previous poster noted. David Wilson Dept Comp Sci, Uni of Wollongong, Australia