this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Once a person left the house, you couldn't reach them unless you know where they will be and called that place.
I never really thought of it this way before, but we really shifted from calling places to calling people.
Dire Straits were Calling Elvis in 1991 tho.
But was anybody home?
No, he was there all alone.
he didn't leave the building?
Could he come to the phone?
My parents would call people they knew depending on the city they were driving through because it wouldn't be long distance (oh yeah here's one, the scumbag phone companies would charge you more when you weren't calling a local number, meaning within the same county/parrish/borough, usually by the minute). They even did this once they had mobile phones! Imagine nowadays contacting someone because you're going through their city. It's like, "Hey, I like you, but not enough to see if we can meet up for a little visit just to say hi all because the phone call is cheaper."
For any kids out there …. If you’re frustrated with your parents always texting to know where you are, can you even imagine parents calling the houses of all your friends to find you?
And you only had to dial 7 numbers (at least in the US)
when I was wee we only needed to use 5 digits for many years. The system would assume the first digit you dialed was the final digit of the initial group. When they switched us to the full 7 digits people acted SO annoyed: who's got that kind of time when you're using a rotary phone?
This was around sporadically in the US Great Plains until maybe the 1990s. And calling outside your city but within the same area code was an eight-digit call:
1 + seven-digit local phone number
I still can’t quite believe it, especially when my city added a 6th area code a few years back.
That's wild. We did have an old antique rotary phone though! My sister and I would play with it like a toy unplugged but it was also perfectly functional. You just had to be fast because it seemed like in later years the 'timeout' between dialing numbers had gotten shorter. You'd have to dial two 9's in a row and before you could finish the second 9, you'd get some kind of "I'm sorry, the number you have reached is not available" message.
Jenny I've got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don't change your number
Eight six seven five three oh nine
That feels too region specific, NYC has had 10 digit dialing since the turn of the century (I believe there was even an episode of Seinfeld explaining it when they wouldn’t give him a 212 area code), while many other areas have had it less than a decade and I believe some rural area areas still allow the local 7 digit.
That's fair. I was younger when the change happened and fully unaware of it's scope.
Technically, you do still need just the seven numbers if you're calling locally. The phone system will just assume you're calling the local area code if you don't dial one. In my area, it's pretty easy because the only people who don't have the local area code (there's only one even though it's far from a rural area) are people who moved here and never changed their number.
Where I live now, area codes have been subdivided several times, then they went to overlays because there are just too many numbers. There are several area codes your neighbors might be, even if they have a local number.
I’m trying to always keep mine because a good 20 years ago they stopped giving it out altogether, so now it’s “rare”
My grandmother still had the list of her friends’ numbers tacked on the wall next to her telephone stand (which was a little table and chair in the entry way with the house phone, notepad, pencil, and ashtray), and each was a four digit number along with the city name to tell the operator. You’d pick up and wait for the operator – no dialing – and then say ‘Midland 4119’ or whatever, then a person physically connected you.
By the time I was young, they’d replaced that with dialing, but it was recent enough that she hadn’t taken down her cheat sheet yet.
Nonsense, you paged them and then they called you back from a pay-phone.
Sure, if you were wealthy enough to have a pager.
Pffff $10/month was cheaper then a phone line. Scraping together like $100 was a bit harder.
Being mistaken for a drug dealer… yeah, that never happened ;-)
there was a time without cell phones? no way!