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
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.