[evilbob93]

Born in 1961 and these articles don't touch on one thing that I remember when I was a kid: you only needed 5 numbers to dial if you were calling someone else in the same thing. This was the case at my grandparents in Bay City, Michigan in the late 1960s. My cousin's number was LIncoln 2-9729

I have never understood how that worked despite my father working for the phone company. Dad explained a lot of things, but that wasn't one of them.

[ralferoo]

I'm from the UK, but IIRC I think the US phone numbers originally used the 2nd digit to discriminate whether the first 3 digits were a local (7 digits) or national (10 digits).

Not sure where your 5 digit example fits into that though, that'd suggest there was actually 3 levels of discriminators originally. It's certainly plausible when there were relatively few numbers used, with the push to 7 and 10 digits only when the number space was getting fuller so that those prefixes could be reused.

[nerdbert]

There was a timeout. If you had touch tone it was faster to dial the whole thing because then the call would connect straight away.

[Symbiote]

Interesting.

In the European countries in familiar with, there would be a prefix digit (usually 0) to show a call was not local. (And a different prefix to make an international call, usually 00.)

So if you live in London and have a landline phone, you can call Westminster Council by dialing 7641 6000. Outside London you'd need to dial 020 7641 6000.

The 0 isn't really part of the number, so from abroad you typically dial 0044 20 7641 6000 (but the international prefix varies, so it's written [phone].)

[jandrese]

Worth it on rotary phones though. Those were so slow to dial, especially if someone had a lot of high digits in their number.

[gpvos]

Alternatively, in some places they actually made sure there were no common prefixes.