smb@research.att.com (07/30/88)
Many years ago, I had an old rotary phone with 'Z' on the 0 digit. If I recall correctly, it was a 300-series phone, not the 500 series we're all familiar with today as the ``standard desk phone''. I also still have a card-operated dialer phone; it caused me a bit of trouble a few years ago. At the time, I was living in Chapel Hill, back when the university still owned the local phone system. The switch was quite old, and had some very odd dialing conventions. The university's lines had exchanges 933 and 966; dialing within those exchanges was 3-yyyy or 6-yyyy. Outside numbers were not preceeded with a 9 -- since no local exchange began with a 3 or 9, the full number was unambiguous. In fact, since all local exchanges had a first digit of 9, anyone outside the university could use 6-digit dialing. There were other oddities as well. (Since then, btw, Southern Bell was forced to buy the phone company, and they replaced the switch with an ESS.) At the time of this incident, the phone system had run out of numbers on the non-university lines, so 933 numers were assigned to outside customers. The university dialing conventions applied -- I not only shouldn't dial the full 7 digits, I couldn't. I used my dialer to reach the comp center's modem pool, which was 933-9911; I dialed 3-9911. But the dialer went too fast for the switch sometimes; the second digit was too much for it, and it decided to give me dialtone back. The dialer didn't realize this, and continued to dial the remainder of the number -- 911....