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matthiasl | 1 year ago

Interesting.

Normally, films use deliberately fictious numbers, e.g. in the US it's always xxx555xxxxxx. Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1. The Pink Floyd number is a bit unusual---it's not made up.

According to a previous analysis, the call was the album's "Chief Engineer James Guthrie who called his own London apartment", with a neighbour answering the phone. Someone probably knows roughly where James Guthrie lived in 1979/1980 and what the area code there was. But I don't.

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stordoff|1 year ago

> Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1.

Ofcom has set aside blocks of numbers within many different area codes for dramatic use[1]. The note on Wikipedia about 011x and 01x1 is that the reserved numbers in those (real) area codes usually end with 496 0xxx (so, for instance, 0114 496 0000 to 0114 496 0999 are reserved numbers in the Sheffield/0114 area - other 0114 numbers may be allocated to real customers).

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...

kmoser|1 year ago

Somebody could contact James Guthrie since he's still alive and probably has his old apartment phone number written down somewhere (if not still memorized).

aardvark179|1 year ago

Okay. If the call was from within the UK then I think the 0441 code would have been Swansea, but that would have required 3 numbers being cut from the middle.