old telephones

[taff1949]

just out of curiosity, what was the purpose of the groups of three letters with every number on the old dial telephones? might be obvious to a lot of you,but not to me. please dont say texting

[joko]

people used to use words to remember a number.

like that current ad for the new reverse charges telephone number - if you follow the letters on the dial spelling out 'reverse', you will get the right number.

it is still used, but not as common any more

[kempie]

When Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) was introduced in the early 60s dialling codes for the non-Director* exchanges were written as:

zero, two letters with mnemonic significance followed by one, two or three digits, e.g.:

BRistol 0BR2 (0272)
CArdiff 0CA2 (0222)
IPswich 0IP3 (0473)

Keynsham (BRistol) 0BR5 6 (0275 6)

etc.

The use of letters was dropped within a few years but in this case there were no actual code changes except that a few codes which had been put on 0Oxx were changed to leave 00 free for other things (eventually International dialling). Eg. 0OX2 Oxford became 0865.


*Six Director Cities were given seven digit telephone numbers. These were written as three letters and four digits. One of the most famous was the number for the Metropolitan Police: WHItehall 1212 (944 1212).

About 1966 the letters were abandoned in favour of all digit numbers.

http://www.rhaworth.myby.co.uk/phreak/tenp_uk.htm

[Buenchico]

Although I've never visited the USA, I assume that american telephones still retain the groups of letters on telephone keypads. This is because US magazines carry lots of advertisements where a telephone number is often just given as "1-800-FLOWERS" or similar.

There was a time, a few years ago, when some UK advertisers tried to persuade British firms to buy similar 'alphabetic' numbers. This seemed doomed to failure because most UK phones don't have the letters on them!

You might have seen lorries distributing food products on behalf of a company called '3663'. (They've got a depot just a few miles up the road from me). For years I couldn't work out why the company (which is the privatised version of the old NAAFI) chose this name. That was until I met someone who worked for them. Apparently, the name was chosen because '3663' is the numeric equivalent of 'FOOD' on a telephone keypad.

Chris

[gastwo]

Thanks for that Chris! 3663 has been bugging me for ages! (sorry for butting in taff...)