I'm old enough to remember party lines in rural areas. A dial phone hung by an outside door of my parent's house.
I'm not sure my arms are long enough to read an e-book on a phone. Unless I set the font so that there are only about three words per line.
Cindy Hamilton
I'm not that old, but do remember having a party line. To call someone in town would require dialing 5 digits. To call someone on the party line would require dialing 14 digits.
When they got dialing for long distance, you dial 11 digits and the operator comes on and asks what number the call is FROM.
[snip]
That was the wall phone in the kitchen. My parents had a desk phone in their bedroom and that was completely replaced the same day.
I might not be older than you. I left out what's more important, that I lived in a small city (50,000) and we didn't get dial phones until years after some others did. It was about 1954 or 55, but I've seen movies set in New York City where they had dial phones 5 or 10 years before that. (Well, probably not 45 or 46, when we were still catching up from the war.)
14! A profligate waste of numbers. Numbers don't grow on trees.When we got DDD it already knew where it was from, but I was probably in Indianapolis, 1957, by then.
Back to when we didn't have dials, my mother moves to where her new husband (my father to be) lived, and the operator would says Number, please. And she woudl say OLiver 4-3435, for example. After 2 or 3 days, the operator said, You don't have to say OLiver 4, Ma'am. They're all OLiver 4.
A 4-digit code (which I've forgotten) to call the same line you're on, plus the 10-digit number of the person to call (I don't know why the
5-digit thing wouldn't work there).Party line. Maybe it was for the billing.
They were all the same where i lived until about 1990 (although I never heard a name like your "Oliver"). For local numbers, people would say "7-" and 4 digits, since that's all you had to dial. The requirement for the 7 before the 4 digits may have something to do with the special functions of 0 and 1, where "7-0212" calls the local time & temp line but "0212" gets the operator.
Party lines were fun if one of the parties had a teen aged kid talking to the love of their life.
I remember my parents calling my brother in Seattle on Christmas day. The long distance operator would call you back when a line was open.
We had AShley, CEdar, BEdford, ARsenal and a couple of others, Other than Arsenal I don't know where the exchange names came from. Arsenal was Watervliet, home of the arsenal of the same name and the Atomic Cannon.
Even as a kid I was not sold on the idea of a cannon that would shoot a nuclear shell a maximum of 20 miles. Looking down the bore of one when the arsenal had their open house was impressive though.
For a short time, I lived in an old part of Fort Worth. Some old advertisements had numbers starting with ED6 (336). I once saw an old map showing that as the EDison exchange.
Considering old stuff, I still have an old dining room chair with a label saying it was made by "Virtue Bros. Mfg. Co." in Los Angeles 45, California.
I seem to have heard that the range of that cannon was less than the radius of the nuclear explosion.
I have an ancient carpenter's apron that was given away as a promo by a local lumber yard. It has the name and phone number of the business printed on it. The phone number has 5 digits. I think we found it in the garage of a house we rented, and the landlord said we could have it.
Cindy Hamilton
They fired it once and I think they got the projectile out to 7 miles.
They sent a few to Europe. I can't find the photo but I'm pretty sure it was that weapons system that had a little problem navigating medieval streets in a German town.
Somebody made money though. That's all that counts.
One of the US NATO commanders commented that European cities were 2 kilotons apart. That didn't sit well with the Europeans.
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