Zip and area codes

[jwolfer]

I love seeing the old-style precursor to the ZIP Code in that letter–"Washington 4, D.C." I've always been tempted to try using one of those to send a postcard to a relative just to see if it would work. Something like "Brooklyn 9, NY" instead of "11209."

I wonder why they did that for Washington, but clearly used zip codes for every other town mentioned in the letter (Rolla, MO 65401, etc)? 

As a side note, I still occasionally give out my phone number in the "old style", even though that was long out of use by the time I was born.  "give me a call at GLendale 4-XXXX"

The city x, state was prezip codes... large cities had zones that became the last part of the zip code.  My grandparents lived in Jacksonville 10, Fla.   Post zip-code it was Jacksonville, FL 32210... Remember the 2 letter state abbreviations became official w zip codes... many of the abbreviations are the same but in all caps (ie Md. became MD, N.J. became NJ)
,

[jwolfer]

Area codes officially NPA have some interesting history.  Originally, they had to have a 0 or a 1 as the middle digit.  If the state had one area code the middle digit was 0 and if more than one the middle digit was a 1. ( ie Florida at one time was all 305, and New York was 212 for the city and prob 716 for Buffalo( not sure of that)  That pretty quickly changed. More important places has less clicks on a dial phone 212 was given to NYC that was 5 clicks.  803 to SC which was 21 clicks.  Backwaters were given exchanges like 899... when i was a kid back in the 70s and push-button phones were extra money my dad wouldnt pay for it so dialing 899-9779 took forever

[kphoger]

Many of the Caribbean nations' area codes are built-in mnemonic devices:
264 = ANG = Anguilla
268 = ANT = Antigua
284 = BVI = British Virgin Islands
473 = GRE - Grenada
758 = SLU = Saint Lucia
767 = ROS = Dominica, whose capital is Roseau
784 = SVG = Saint Vincent & the Grenadines
868 = TNT = Trinidad and Tobago

Also, the Canadian territories are at the 867 (TOP) of the world.

[empirestate]

As a force of habit, I always tend to give the area code when referencing a telephone number, probably since my cell phone (also my primary phone) has a 315 area code, whereas I live in the 518 area code.  I've had the same phone number since I was in college and see no reason to change.

I actually do the same, since my area code is 585, but my 7-digit number starts with 315, which is also an adjacent area code to mine. When in my home area, I assume people will hear 315 as my area code if I don't start by saying 585; of course, that matters less now that I don't live there.

Also, it's been a while, but I used to get a lot of calls for an apartment complex that had the same number as mine but with an 866 area code, and is located in the same county.

[6a]

Many of the Caribbean nations' area codes are built-in mnemonic devices:
264 = ANG = Anguilla
268 = ANT = Antigua
284 = BVI = British Virgin Islands
473 = GRE - Grenada
758 = SLU = Saint Lucia
767 = ROS = Dominica, whose capital is Roseau
784 = SVG = Saint Vincent & the Grenadines
868 = TNT = Trinidad and Tobago

Also, the Canadian territories are at the 867 (TOP) of the world.

Legend has it Las Vegas wanted 777 when they were going to add a code to Nevada but there is or was some kind of rule about triple digit codes so they got 775 instead.

[hbelkins]

When the 606 area code was split, the Lexington area got 859 (UKY).

I prefer an overlay to changing or splitting an area code. It's not that much more inconvenient to have to dial 10 digits instead of seven, and you have to dial 11 digits if you make a long-distance call anyway.

For more than half of my life, you only had to dial the last four digits of a phone number here to make a local call. The county was small enough that only one prefix was needed.  In other places, such as Morehead where I went to college and Irvine where I worked for several years, you dialed the last five digits.

The original landline exchange for Jackson, where I work, was (and remains) 666. 

[kphoger]

Legend has it Las Vegas wanted 777 when they were going to add a code to Nevada but there is or was some kind of rule about triple digit codes so they got 775 instead.

The rule is actually that area codes ending in double digits are reserved for special use–called ERCs (Easily Recognizable Codes)–such as toll-free numbers.  So it wasn't the fact that it was all 7s, but rather that it ended in a double digit.

[1995hoo]

I recall the mid-1990s revision to the area code scheme (allowance of middle digits other than zero or one) causing some problems for various telephone companies. I was in my final year at UVA when the first of those new area codes were introduced and I recall the local phone company management being very upset because they had to change the dialing protocol for long-distance calls within the same area code–prior to the change, if we wanted to make a long-distance call within the 804 area code (say, if I wanted to call my brother, who attended William & Mary), we were to dial 1 plus the seven-digit phone number without the area code (e.g., 1-971-2964). The new area codes forced them to change to requiring the area code for all long-distance calls (which is what I had been used to before I went away to college) because the "971" could now be used as an area code (it's now assigned to Oregon).

Conversely, I remember when I was a kid we didn't have to dial the area code to call from Northern Virginia to the District of Columbia or parts of Maryland except when calling long-distance to Maryland. The three-digit prefixes were not duplicated across the local jurisdictions at the time (so, for example, 573-7470 was assigned solely to the house we lived in back in the 1970s and nobody in DC or Maryland had that number). Eventually when they started running out of numbers we had to add the area code for calls to the other jurisdictions (202 for DC, 301 for Maryland) so that they could re-use prefixes, but the requirement of ten-digit dialing for all local calls came a lot later. Even though we now have to use the area code for every call due to the overlay codes, I still know quite a few people who will omit the area code when saying their number under the assumption that the person hearing the number will assume it's a 703 number unless otherwise specified.

I recall over the years some people having lots of problems remembering to add the "1" for long-distance calls. In the late 1990s the office where I worked in downtown DC had phone numbers beginning with "310." I kept getting wrong-number calls from people trying to call Los Angeles, presumably because they forgot to dial "1" and so after seven digits the call went to me.

Many of the Caribbean nations' area codes are built-in mnemonic devices:
264 = ANG = Anguilla
268 = ANT = Antigua
284 = BVI = British Virgin Islands
473 = GRE - Grenada
758 = SLU = Saint Lucia
767 = ROS = Dominica, whose capital is Roseau
784 = SVG = Saint Vincent & the Grenadines
868 = TNT = Trinidad and Tobago

Also, the Canadian territories are at the 867 (TOP) of the world.

Legend has it Las Vegas wanted 777 when they were going to add a code to Nevada but there is or was some kind of rule about triple digit codes so they got 775 instead.

The Space Coast area of Florida (Melbourne, Merritt Island, etc.) has area code 321. I'm sure that's not a coincidence given the NASA presence there.



Regarding ZIP codes, somebody mentioned the ZIP+4 codes further up the thread. I always use ours when feasible, but I find it amusing that some online forms simply refuse to accept the "+4" portion. Most of them will accept six characters to allow for Canadian postal codes, but I've found that quite a few won't allow any more than that.

[hbelkins]

Irony of ironies -- Kentucky just announced today that a new area code is needed in the western part of the state. It's going to be 364; now they have to decide if they want to do a split or an overlay.

[agentsteel53]

we didn't have to dial the area code to call from Northern Virginia to the District of Columbia or parts of Maryland except when calling long-distance to Maryland.

that seems awfully arbitrary and tough to remember.  why is some of Maryland long-distance and some not?

I much prefer today's 10-digit dialing scheme, especially with the proliferation of cell phones whose area codes do not match their owner's primary location.

[kphoger]

we didn't have to dial the area code to call from Northern Virginia to the District of Columbia or parts of Maryland except when calling long-distance to Maryland.

that seems awfully arbitrary and tough to remember.  why is some of Maryland long-distance and some not?

I much prefer today's 10-digit dialing scheme, especially with the proliferation of cell phones whose area codes do not match their owner's primary location.

I save all my contacts as 10-digit numbers in my cell phone, even though I could dial the local ones as seven digits if I preferred.  It especially makes it easy when dialing from out of state, as it's necessary then to add the area code anyway.  Roaming in México still confuses the heck out of me, though–whether to dial a local number as a local number, a long-distance number, or an international number; the answer seems to vary by provider and type of phone (land/cell) I'm dialing.

[1995hoo]

we didn't have to dial the area code to call from Northern Virginia to the District of Columbia or parts of Maryland except when calling long-distance to Maryland.

that seems awfully arbitrary and tough to remember.  why is some of Maryland long-distance and some not?

I much prefer today's 10-digit dialing scheme, especially with the proliferation of cell phones whose area codes do not match their owner's primary location.

I have no idea how it works now–especially since I no longer pay extra for long-distance calls–much less how it worked in the days of the Bell System prior to the breakup, but I believe the phone companies define(d) a "local calling area" (that might not be the technical term) and so calls within that area are local calls even if the area code differs, although at the same time calls within the same area code but outside that local area might be long-distance. Consider geography and it's easy enough to understand why a call from, say, Fairfax County in Virginia to Bethesda in Maryland should be a "local" call but a call from Fairfax County in Virginia to the town of Accident in the far corner of the Maryland panhandle should be a long-distance call. Or if you viewed it in reverse it would be even easier to understand–if you were calling from Bethesda to Virginia, surely no reasonable person would argue that a call to Big Stone Gap (way down in Southwest Virginia near the Kentucky state line) ought to be considered a "local" call, especially when Big Stone Gap is further from Northern Virginia than New York City is (and New York has always been a long-distance call from around here).

Obviously the idea of long-distance calls within the same area code is a lot less common in much of the USA than it was 25 years ago except in a few states that retain single area codes (Maine is an example). Originally ALL of Virginia was within the 703 area code, for example, until 804 was split off in the mid-1970s. My example of calling from the DC area to Big Stone Gap is a good example of what back then would have been a long-distance call within the area code, although I don't recall the "1" prefix being required for long-distance until sometime in the 1980s. I wasn't all that interested in this sort of thing at the time and so I don't recall when or why the "1" was added, but I believe I read somewhere that the point of requiring the "1" was to allow additional area codes that previously wouldn't have been permitted–that is, area codes that duplicated local exchanges. The "1" tells the system the next three digits are an area code rather than a local exchange–which goes back to the example I cited in my prior post of dingbats who were trying to call from DC to Los Angeles and instead rang my office on K Street because omitting the "1" made the phone system interpret "310" as a local exchange in "310-xxxx."

I don't know where the boundary is/was, but I seem to recall that Baltimore was always a long-distance call. In terms of population location that makes sense; while nowadays the DC and Baltimore areas are sometimes considered to be a large urban area, that wasn't really the case 30 and 40 years ago.

But it wasn't really that big a deal from a practical standpoint: If you tried to call Baltimore without the area code, you either found you had called the wrong number or you got an error message from the phone company.

Come to think of it, I seldom dial "1" on my mobile phone when I make a call except for some toll-free calls that don't go through without it.

[agentsteel53]

I believe the 1 became mandatory when local exchanges started having 0 and 1 as the middle digit, and/or when area codes had digits other than 0 and 1 as the middle digit.  before that, it was unambiguous: if the second digit dialed was a 0 or 1, it was a 10 digit number, otherwise it was 7.

I never dial a 1, but sometimes my phone adds it.

[1995hoo]

I believe the 1 became mandatory when local exchanges started having 0 and 1 as the middle digit, and/or when area codes had digits other than 0 and 1 as the middle digit.  before that, it was unambiguous: if the second digit dialed was a 0 or 1, it was a 10 digit number, otherwise it was 7.

I never dial a 1, but sometimes my phone adds it.

I just looked at the phonebook on our home phone and I see we've put in the "1" for some numbers but not others. I assume the phone probably adds it automatically when needed because the setup menu has a section where you program in your local area codes–I assume that means if a number uses an area code not on that list, it treats it as a long-distance call. I never really thought about it until this thread because the calls just go through, but I have no idea why we sometimes put in the "1" and sometimes didn't.

[KEVIN_224]

There was the time I lived in Old Orchard Beach, ME between September of 1985 and June of 1987. Every number in the town started with (207)-934-XXXX. Also, with this being in the last days of rotary dial phones for many, it was possible to just dial 4-XXXX if making a call with the town. I'm sure it was the same way when I was a little kid in nearby Wells, ME from 1974 to October of 1977. Every number there was (207)-646-XXXX.

Here in Connecticut, the state was split up at the end of August of 1995. What was once all (203) became two zones:

Fairfield (except the Town of Sherman), New Haven, and Litchfield (the towns of Woodbury, Bethlehem, and a small part of Roxbury).

The (860) area code was created on August 28, 1995 as a split from area code (203) when the latter was cut back to Fairfield County (except for the Town of Sherman) and New Haven County, plus the towns of Bethlehem, Woodbury, and a small part of Roxbury in Litchfield County. Use of (860) became mandatory October 4, 1996. We're soon supposed to have a (959) overlay here. Ten-digit dialing is mandatory here as well, even if calling a neighbor across the street.

As for the Zip+4 thing on the zip code, it's almost never used by many people here. I'll use it if I'm addressing an envelope (XXXXX-1735) or if a job or credit card application asks for it. The mail takes the same amount of time to and from here, whether I use it or not.

[mgk920]

The USPS' postmarker/stamp cancelling machines also include a step where they will read the 'to' addresses on the envelops (they can quickly resolve some pretty bad chicken scratch, too!), look them up in their database and add those correct nine-digit ZIP Code barcodes that are found below the addresses - this as the letters are shooting through those machines.  With that barcode, they can then machine sort those letters every step of the way down to the block for final delivery.

Many word-processing programs can put those barcodes on envelops before letters are mailed, too.

Pretty amazing, IMHO.

Mike

[Alps]

Regarding how some of Maryland could be long-distance - Within your area code, you had a local dialing area that was toll free, and then outside that area was long distance. 201 covered all of North Jersey, but my local dialing area was Essex County (give or take). If I wanted to call New Brunswick (before the 908 split), it would have been long distance within my area code, so I could have done it in seven digits. Of course, being a child, I wasn't allowed long distance, so I don't know about the dialing 1.

[hbelkins]

In Kentucky, in general local calling areas are limited to your county. Anything outside your county is long distance.

[cpzilliacus]

we didn't have to dial the area code to call from Northern Virginia to the District of Columbia or parts of Maryland except when calling long-distance to Maryland.

that seems awfully arbitrary and tough to remember.  why is some of Maryland long-distance and some not?

I much prefer today's 10-digit dialing scheme, especially with the proliferation of cell phones whose area codes do not match their owner's primary location.

In the D.C. area, everything inside the Capital Beltway was local to everything else, even though there were (back in the day) three area codes involved (202, 301 and 703).  The local calling area extended some distance beyond the Capital Beltway as well.  Rockville, the City of Fairfax, Springfield, Bowie and Greenbelt were local to each other.  But Gaithersburg was beyond that boundary, as were Lorton, Herndon, Waldorf and Laurel (if you lived in those places, you could pay a little extra for an exchange that was "closer-in" and thus local to other places around the Beltway.

[mgk920]

Before the area code expansion thing in the early 1990s (allowing 2-8 as the second digit), there were many instances along area code boundaries such as calling out of Weyauwega, WI (then 414-867, now 920-867, et al) - next-door Waupaca, WI (715-258, etc) was a seven-digit local call.  Someone in Weyauwega dialing '258-xxxx' would get someone in Waupaca while that same someone adding a '1' to the dialed number string ('1-258-xxxx') would instead get someone in suburban Milwaukee (Menominee Falls, then 414-258, now 262-258, et al).

Today, local landline calls from Weyauwega to Waupaca are 1+10d, while calls within Weyauwega are still just 7d.

As for me (cell phone with a number starting with 920-810), I just dial all outgoing calls as 10 digit numbers.  It saves me a lot of needless confusion.

Mike

[kphoger]

I never use the extra four digits on the ZIP code.  Except if it's going to the government.  Because, then, I want to make darned sure I addressed it the way they said to.

[6a]

In Kentucky, in general local calling areas are limited to your county. Anything outside your county is long distance.

I was told by a BellSouth customer service lady that Atlanta has the largest local calling area in the world - you can call a small part of Alabama as a local call.  It was weird moving to a place like you describe, where only a couple miles can make the difference.

[vdeane]

I never use the extra four digits on the ZIP code.  Except if it's going to the government.  Because, then, I want to make darned sure I addressed it the way they said to.

I usually don't for my home address; I always do for my Clarkson box, since the last four are the box number, though the mail room is good about sorting mail by box so just the one in the street address line would probably suffice.

Fun fact: Clarkson has it's on zip code - 13699 (rest of Potsdam is 13676).

[Road Hog]

At some point in the next 30 years we're going to run out of phone numbers. There are some proposals out there, like adding a 0 at the end of area codes and making area codes four digits. But any new numbering plan needs to be settled now, so that new equipment can be manufactured that's ready for the change.

[brad2971]

At some point in the next 30 years we're going to run out of phone numbers. There are some proposals out there, like adding a 0 at the end of area codes and making area codes four digits. But any new numbering plan needs to be settled now, so that new equipment can be manufactured that's ready for the change.

Nope, not even close. Not even half the area codes that are available under current requirements now are being used, and this last decade has seen area code allotment slow to no more than 2/year. In fact, we're in the middle of a process in which numbers themselves are alloted in 1000-number increments instead of the previous 10000-number increment. So, instead of a company getting an allotment like 303-979-xxxx, you are seeing a company get 303-979-9xxx.

Confusing, to be sure. Also, it helps the phone numbers last a few more generations.