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
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!