this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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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.