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"😀