Patrick_A_Townson@cup.portal.com (07/27/88)
Our recent correspondent from the Netherlands tells of some peculiar exchanges which overlap the political boundary lines between countries in Europe. Although that is rare in North America, it happens occassionally here also. Usually it will be in the case of one or two small towns which sit almost squarely on the border between the United States and Canada. One will be on one side and the other will be on the other side. Typically either a Canadian area code will be extended a few miles into the States to pick up the one over here, or sometimes it will be in reverse. Check out the border communities in Maine, New York State, North Dakota, Montana and Washington State for examples of this. Another oddity is the small town which sits in the northwesternmost corner of Washington State. (Name of town escapes me for the moment). It is logically connected to Canada, but this little peninsula drops down from the Canadian mainland a few miles and that little area is politically part of the United States. It is in the 206 area code for billing purposes, but numbers there can be dialed 604-xxx-xxxx or 206-xxx-xxxx. You can get information for numbers in the town from either 604 or 206-555-1212. Their phone service is actually supplied by a Canadian phone company which also serves the Vancouver, British Columbia territory. There are alot of oddities about that town besides the dual area codes. The only way in or out of that part of the United States is through Canada. The children go to school in a school bus every day which leaves the States, goes 2-3 miles across the southern tip of Canada and comes back into the States. To the south, there are a couple of cases in remote areas of Arizona and New Mexico where the local area codes (602 & 505 respectively) drop down into Mexico for less than a mile or two, to provide service via 'toll stations' to very remote areas with only one or two phones for miles around. A few business places located in Mexico choose for whatever reason to have (in this case, truly) 'foreign exchange service' from Texas. And throughout the United States, there are many communities which straddle the border between one state and another. Typically the area code designation was an arbitrary decision at one time or another placing the community for billing purposes in one state or the other; often times either area code will work, but not always. In the same issue of TELECOM, a correspondent outlined the various ways letters will appear on telephone dials. Like him, I have also seen a dial with a /Z/ on the zero opening on the dial. (This was only once, and it was years ago, long before touch tone. I saw it on a rotary dial.) What I rarely see any more are the *sixteen button* touch tone pads, which were common many years ago on phones connected to the AUTOVON (Automatic Voice Network) system of the U.S. Government. The four extra buttons, which appeared to the right of the 3,6,9 and # buttons were marked A,B,C, and D. Does anyone remember what they were for, and what they did? I seem to recall having one such phone in my possession at one time many years ago and experimenting by hooking it to a regular line. The 'normal' buttons 0-9, # and * did what they were supposed to do, but it seems to me the A-B-C-D buttons emitted tones, but there was no reaction to them by the network. Does anyone remember the old card dialer phones, where you stuck a plastic card which looked sort of like a credit card into your phone? You shoved the card in all the way and a spring pushed it back up. The card had punch holes in it that you had earlier created, which dialed the desired number. Typically, the owner of one of those speed dial phones had a supply of 20-30 plastic cards, each punched for a desired number, which were kept in a little box attached to the side of the phone. Patrick Townson