internetsdairyRecommend telling your kids that back in the day the length of time it took to dial a phone number was proportionate to the sum of its digits
Graham Knapp@internetsdairy kind of crazy that the UK emergency number was 999 in the age of dial and cradle phones. It was fun tapping on the cradle to dial as a party trick tho
@graham_knapp I think it might be that it was 999 on purpose so it was harder to dial accidentally
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)It was hard to dial accidentally and the 9 was as far as you could turn the dial, so you didn't need to do anything other than just spin the dial as far as it would go.
Mike Crowe@david_chisnall @internetsdairy @graham_knapp No. Zero was beyond nine to generate ten clicks (in the UK at least). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_dial#Function (further down the page the reason for 999 is explained too).
@mikecrowe @internetsdairy @graham_knapp
Somehow, I completely forgot that phone numbers contain zeroes. In spite of area codes all starting with one. I blame Sunday.
the hatter@internetsdairy @graham_knapp It was definitely a feature - the idea of using 1-1-1 1-1-2 or similar was dismissed because not so much that it was accidentally dialled by a user with a phone, but that interference or hung cables tapping together could much more easily 'dial' those patterns. Given the time period, being 3 human-dialled digits was quick, the extra maybe 0.5s per digit wasn't a significant period of time. As other countries copied the idea later, systems were better understood.
klml@graham_knapp TIL in Germany we have a word for this: Gabelschlag https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabelschlag (honorable mention @nachtigal 🙏 )
@klml @nachtigal TIL ich auch, Danke fur die neue wort also für mich auch sagt Mann jetzt Gabelschlag. "Let me Gabelschlag that for you"😀
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@internetsdairy and texting a message took a time approximately proportional to the sum of its character alphabetical indices modulo 3
James Widman@internetsdairy except that for every instance of '0' you need to add 10
Zalasur 🐸🇺🇦@internetsdairy *blinks in morse code for holy shit*
Nick@[email protected] they very rarely dial anything, let alone on a dial
Tony Garnock-Jones@internetsdairy Except in New Zealand (and, apparently, Oslo, I learned from downthread) where it was proportional to the sum of the tens complements of the digits!
Zeeshan Ali Khan 
🇺🇦@internetsdairy you'd first have to explain what "dialing a number" means
rk: it’s hyphen-minus actuallyYep. For technical reasons then, area codes’ middle digits had to be a 1 or a 0 and the first and third couldn’t be 1 or 0. Area codes were assigned based on population such that shortest-to-dial area codes went to the most populous cities.
The shortest possible area code (5 clicks, 212) went to NYC.
Where I grew up the area code was 409, a whole 23 clicks, almost five times longer than NYC’s!
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘@internetsdairy Also tell them longer numbers took longer. And dialling was fun and old people like me miss it.
Eli the BeardedWhere 0 counts as ten. The original 1947 plan had all full state area codes (and only full state area codes) get a zero as the second digit. That part didn't survive into the widespread public implementation. But giving Puerto Rico 809 and Alaska 907 while North Dakota gets 701 really sent a message. (Note that direct dial started in 1951, while Alaska only became a state in 1959.)
@elithebearded ok I'm in the UK but thanks
AT&T's plan is also influenced why country codes are what they are. Taiwan is 886 because China had sway to punish them.
(And North Americans could dial each other with one plus area code, but dialing outside NA required a zero first. But in the days of rotating dials, you probably did want that extra time to consider the cost.)
Ranid@internetsdairy this took me so long to figure out what weird part of the phone protocol or how calling worked would make it be like this before i remembered the rotary dial </3
@internetsdairy did rotary dials being common and the UK emergency number being "999" ever coexist. if so that seemed like an oversight lol
@ranidspace they did, for a long time. They possibly did it like that to make it less likely to dial accidentally.
Programmer 832-529 🍅@internetsdairy @ranidspace 0 was "past" 9 so an even worse number would be 000 which is what Australia uses for emergency calls.
Wild to think how a pizza chain used 411 1111 which was almost the fastest number to dial.
Naga (he/him)@ranidspace @internetsdairy I wondered that too when I learned of 999, thinking that would take notably longer to actually dial in an emergency than 911 in the US.
Kroc Camen@internetsdairy Before tone dialling, when phones were pulse dialled, you had to press the digits the exact amount of time needed for them to register; 0 was fast, 9 was slow ;)
@internetsdairy
I dreamed about the speed issues of phone dials last night...
I dreamed about the speed issues of phone dials last night...