Telephone exchange names were used with the old electromechanical telephone central office equipment like Crossbar and step-by-step relays.
Once central offices were converted to all electronic switching, those names were no longer needed. The popular names here in Olympia, Washington were FLeetwood and WHitehall.
Lots of rural party lines had 6 or more customers on the same line - they just had different "rings". When your phone rang there was 3 long and 2 short rings if you were ring 32, and 1 long and 5 short if you were ring 15.
Your line number was the first part of your phone number - so you could be 415R32 or 416R32 - with the line number assigned to your local exchange. A local exhange in those days might have had 5 or 6 lines, with up to 20 or 30 or more customers on a single line. I think the line was split into several subs, or party lines so not everyone on a given exchange line was on the same party line. I remember my grandfather's farm was on a party line with 7 or 8 other farms on the concession - and was Ring32.
There were two types lines.
First the ancient one where a line was run from a telephone switchboard (us ually manned by women) out into the sticks. Everyone on that line could ta lk to each other (several at once until there were too many and the sound g ot very weak). Those had different rings. Ours was 2 long, 6 short. That was in the days of the handcrank phone. To talk to people not on that lin e you had to go through the operator who would manually plug your line into the line of the person you wanted.
Next was the "modern" dial phone. It was a party line but you should have only heard your ring. Only one call could be going at a time. I was on one of those for awhile but someone screwed up and connected me to a private l ine (at party line rates).
Harry K Harry K
When I first learned the two wires to the phone were called the tip and the ring, I assumed the ring was coming in on the ring, as in your example just above, the green or the yellow. Is there any truth to that? Is that related to the name ring?
Because when I was 60 y.o. I finally realized the ring was the second conductor on a phone plug, behind the tip. I know that's valid nomenclature, but it doesn't prove ring wasn't also used for the wire the ring came in on. ????
??? What would non-unique numbers be?
OT, but anyhow, South of Baltimore one finds Telegraph Road. It goes to Washington DC but it doesn't have that name everywhere. I don't know what it was called when Morse ?? or Bell ?? ran the first telegraph ?? or phone ?? line from Baltimore to Washington, but that's the path.
Now I'm confused because it's the phone line that's famous, I think. Or is it the first telegraph line to another city?
Also nearby is where the famous competition between the railroad engine and the horse was. I forget the details fo that too, but I know where the track is.
A telephone "network device" runs on only 2 wires. The ring is just a different voltage/frequency impresson across the line that the "network" inside the phone decodes and sends to the ringer. The "hook" and "off-hook" signals are generated by resistance across the line.
On hook you should have about 48 volts DC. Taking a phone off-hook creates a DC signal path across the pair, which is detected as loop current back at the central office. This drops the voltage measured at the phone down to about 3 to 9 volts. An off-hook telephone typically draws about 15 to 20 milliamps of DC current to operate, at a DC resistance around 180 ohms. The remaining voltage drop occurs over the copper wire path and over the telephone company circuits. These circuits provide from 200 to 400 ohms of series resistance to protect from short circuits and decouple the audio signals.
To ring your telephone, the phone company momentarily applies a 90 VRMS, 20 Hz AC signal to the line. Even with a thousand ohms of line resistance, this can still hurt if you grab the wire when it rings!!!
The 3 volt DC "off hook" voltage carries the modulation of the voice signal - which on classic fhones consisted of the earpeice in series with the carbon button mic. (which changed resistance with sound vibrations)
+1
The shortage of area codes with a middle number of 0 or 1, and all the other things we are discussing all relate to the general number shortage.
Since the invention and wide-spread use of computers, people use far more numbers than they used to.
At the same time, the Arabs, who invented and still are the major producers of Arabic numbers, limit the supply. In order to charge more. As the price of oil has gone down, they are concentrating more on the price of numbers.
The shortage of numbers is the reason that more and more American employers etc. are using Social Security numbers as employee numbers, or as Medicare numbers. It's the reason many states no longer issue new license plates every year, not the cost of the metal but the cost of a new set of numbers.
Every time you scrap a hard drive with millions or billions of numbers on it, you compound the problem. That's why you should take your old harddrives to Best Buy or some place where they will make sure the numbers are recycled.
Never WIPE a harddrive. That is just wasteful.
The US governments has a large Number Reserve in mines in Nevada and old missile silos in North Dakota, but they will not release the numbers unless the shortage gets much worse. So save your numbers. Even the numbers on receipts, like grocery store receipts, can help a poor family get by.
Yes, it is. Now the big problem is keeping track of what time it is there.
I remember when we'd talk to my grandmother, with my mother one one phone and me and my brother on the other phone. So no one would have to say the same thing twice, at 20 cents a minute for a station-to-station call. And we were doing well to have a second phone. Now I have a dozen phones in the closet and not enough rooms to use them in.
It won't. And if it did, they'd charge 30 cents a minute more in some countries. That just proves it's impossible.
micky wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
In Chicago as a kid my number was HUmboldt 6-2462. My grandmother who lived updtairs was HU6-2542. We lived about a mile from Humboldt Park on the NW side.
Not me. My phone number ends in 20 and I always say two oh.
But what gets me is that in the US in the science field, people slash their zeroes, but iiuc in Europe they slash their o's. What kind of a stupid system are those? Wh'at's the point of having a system if the two parts contradict each other?
Am I wrong? It was never Europe, just IBM? And how can IBM and a few other early mainframe makers be so stupid as to do things backwards?
KLondike.
WYoming.
In Chicago, my exchange one year was BUtterfield 8. I never read the book of the same name however.
Some politicians complained, and maybe forced the Public Service Commission some places to not change or to change back. Conceivably, some places people succeeded driectly without needing a politician.
I was there. In the 1960s we all programmed by filling out "coding sheets". You slashed zeros or ohs. You had to or you would not get what you wanted. I learned Ohs. Other places slashed zeros. It wasn't IBM making the rules.
There should have been follow through, the printers should have been modified to match what was coded. Too late now, but we still struggle with it in the computer field and even in RL.
When I was young ours was GArfield. But then they changed it to HAmilton. There must have been some reasoning behind the change.
try not to use letter o.] tter) in phone "numbers". For example,
- . Christopher A. Young learn more about Jesus .
I heard that tip and ring were refer to the plugs the operators used. Tip was the tip of the plug, and ring wss connected to the back of the 1/4 inch phono plug.
Nothing to do with phone ringers.
- . Christopher A. Young learn more about Jesus .
when 911 became standard, it was often referred to as nine-eleven. some people couldn't figure out how to dial or press eleven, so everyone had to be sure to call it nine-one-one.
Nowadays, there would have to be prefixes such as:
HIjab 4-1234 CHimichanga 7-1234 LGbt 2-6969
Exactly.
There is something to be said for using names as preefixes. I still rememb er my grandparents phone number in Woodside - Queens, NYC, 65 years later. It was HAvemeyer 9-3665. Don't know what area code(s) are in use in that p art of NYC, but it could be fun to call the number and ask to speak with th em.
Our prefix in Chicago was Dorchester 3. I recall my mother having to drop a nickel or a slug in the phone box at home. Each month a guy would come to collect the money, including real money for the slugs. This would have been in the 40's.
In the 60's I was in charge of making ski group reservations each year at Boyne Mountain, MI. The lodge phone number was 10 and I had to go through the long distance operator to reach it.
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