Remember Your First Home Phone Number?

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our first phone was a party line with 2 neighbors ours was two long and 1 short , the neighbors were two short and one long and the other was 1 long 1 short and 1 long . and if you wanted to call out of the area you did 1 long and that got the operator and she would hook you up where ever .
 
Yes, and it started with LO for Logan. That was when I was 8 yrs old and funny thing is I don't remember later phone numbers when they got away from doing that.
 
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67Dart273 said:
The thing is lots of smaller exchanges did not use all seven, so the letter prefix was not used. Our area was "officially" CO for COngress but you only used the last 5 locally
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I grew up in a very small town too. If calling within the same prefix, dialing the last 5 digits worked. If dialing in from another prefix, you had to use the full number.
 
Treblig said:
Kinda like this one that I have hooked up in my house??? I had do some electrical repairs and buy a pulse generator to get it to work with the newer phone lines. It really throws the grand kids for a loop!!
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Mine didn't even have a rotary, it was a ring down to an operator. Like Green Acres: you pick up the phone (closes the hook switch and creates a 50V loop back to central office) and a light and buzzer sounds in the operators board (usually a lady at her house) she camps on and asks what number you want, she dials it on her board, gets a response and then punches you in with a 1/4" jumper that looks like a guitar cable. When the parties hang up, the light goes off and she disconnects you. You see them at estate sales back east. The cranks generates the 90V AC current it takes to ring another line directly and Military field phones used the same principle. Guys in listening posts would tape the leads to their fingers so when they got a call, it would not ring the phone and give away their position...or to wake their sleeping asses up!
 
Not in Florida, but in Massachusetts in 1972 it was 3168, all the numbers at that time were just 4 digits in our local 100 mile range.
 
City CO's are now about 36000 feet from each other to satisfy DSL max loop length. Back then it was as needed with rural lines running for tens of miles with load coils every 7000 feet. Interesting stuff that it even worked back then as it barely works nowadays! Of course they were not using 26g cable either back then.
 
UNiversity 4-2870
DAvis 8-7709
GReenleaf 5-9967
 
GR5-4394, you picked up the headset and the operator said "Number Please". I forget what our ring was...maybe two long rings. We had 10 party lines. Cyclic ringing. 20 cycle, 30 cycle,40 cycle 50 cycle and 60 cycle. The 60 cycle ringers would hum from ac power feedback. I worked 38 years for the phone company, retired from Verizon...THANK GOD!
 
CF4-1212. This was almost identical to a local phone-in weather forecast number (one of the 1st 3 digits was different). My dad used to screw around with people calling us for the latest forecast. Fun stuff.
 
My parents & I lived at my grandmothers house when we first moved to Houston. Her number was WA 3382, then it changed to WA 6-3382, then it changed to 926-3382, & finally 713 926-3382. My grandmother was born in 1894, married my grandfather in 1914 & lived in the same house from 1915 until 1990 before having to be moved to assisted living. She passed away at the ripe old ago of 100.
 
I never knew our phone number when I was living at home.
My brothers and I weren't allowed to use the phone.
To this day I hardly use the phone.
 
GE321 It came in as two longs and a short. We also sometimes received a general ring which would provide news such as the peaches were in at Herthers store or that everyone was going to meet at Fenn's on Sunday afternoon to cut and stack hay since Ronnie hurt his back.
 
213-446-7723
2466 S. Mayflower Ave.
Arcadia, CA. 91016

Had to memorize it for Cub Scouts...lived there until i was 9


Jeff
 
pishta said:
Guys in listening posts would tape the leads to their fingers so when they got a call, it would not ring the phone and give away their position...or to wake their sleeping asses up!
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LOLOL In my 911 install days I've been hit a couple of times with ringer voltage. "Here and there" a ring generator is installed (as I'm sure you know) for stuff like local in house switches or intercoms and such

Around these rural parts the interface to the demark is somewhat sketchy and is NEVER well marked. There are always special lines, dry pairs, used for remote radio base stations, remote control circuits, and alarm monitors. "I think" it was down in Ritzville WA I was trying to figure that mess out, and triggered a remote fire siren "somewhere out there." Pretty soon dispatch started getting calls. Guys (volunteer/ off duty fire guys) in hearing range of the siren had heard it, but their monitor radios/ pagers had not alarmed
 
...........And then there's the minor political battles........In Othello, WA they built a great big city hall/ jail/ pd which I gues was not without some controversy. They had a then state of the art computer controlled HVAC system, and the installing company had to have a phone line to dial into the HVAC for service and programming changes. They insisted they HAD TO HAVE a dedicated phone line. I finally took the bull by the horns and told them to go pound sand. The pd had a dedicated line to a fax which wasn't used "heavily" so I just put a switch in to transfer that line from the fax to the HVAC. Told the HVAC co. to "eff off." "You want to talk to the system, you call the regular dispatch number and tell them to flip the fax switch to the HVAC"

On a side note, I was up in the telco/ radio room doing some work, and there sites the new, unwired UPS. Electrician was up there, and it "occurred" to me, THERE WERE NO color coded electrical outlets down in dispatch. "How do we know" I asked him, "which outlets are supplied from the UPS?" He gave me a funny look--------turns out the moron engineer who spec'd it all out HAD NOT CONSIDERED DISPATCH EQUIPMENT in the UPS drawings. !!!WTF!!!!

So the electrician just wired it all up as spec'd and then they had to go in later and rewire a bunch of crap so the 911 gear would work in a power outage!!!!

This is the Othello radio/ telco/ network gear after most of the mess was cleaned up Motorola phone switch "Centralink" used to be SRX whoever they were. This was "sometime in the 90's"

SCAN01c.JPG
 
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