Pretend post offices and phone systems

[1995hoo]

Regarding phones when we were growing up, something some of our younger members may not know is that once upon a time, you didn't own your own phones. You rented them from the phone company and the selection was exceptionally limited.

I'm amazed every so often, working in the industry, that we still run across new customers who expect to get a telephone from us during their install.

Those are probably the same sort of people who move into my neighborhood and then complain that they are not provided with a trash can upon arrival.

Every place I have lived has provided both trash and recycling bins.

Nowhere I've lived has ever provided a trash can. We get a recycling bin (and when the trash contract goes to a different company, the old company comes around and collects them and the new company distributes new ones) but not a trash can. My trash can is something like 40 years old. My father originally used it to hold the bag into which we emptied the grass from the bagging lawn mower.

[SEWIGuy]

Regarding phones when we were growing up, something some of our younger members may not know is that once upon a time, you didn't own your own phones. You rented them from the phone company and the selection was exceptionally limited.

I'm amazed every so often, working in the industry, that we still run across new customers who expect to get a telephone from us during their install.

Those are probably the same sort of people who move into my neighborhood and then complain that they are not provided with a trash can upon arrival.

Every place I have lived has provided both trash and recycling bins.

Nowhere I've lived has ever provided a trash can. We get a recycling bin (and when the trash contract goes to a different company, the old company comes around and collects them and the new company distributes new ones) but not a trash can. My trash can is something like 40 years old. My father originally used it to hold the bag into which we emptied the grass from the bagging lawn mower.

To be fair, I guess I legally rent my can now. I pay quarterly for trash removal, sewer and stormwater management. And the amount I pay is dependent on the size of can I uses.

[formulanone]

Not me, we were touchtone in the states at least 1980 as far as I can remember. But when I lived in Germany in the early 1990s Deutsche Telekom were still on pulse dialing and cellular service was in its extreme infancy to be kind.

It wasn't until 1994 or 1995 that they even talked about cell phones that could be used in all of Europe.

To be fair, at that time, I figured only Very Wealthy People were going to have cell phones and the rest of us would just use landlines, pay phones, and maybe a few would spring for a beeper. Then again, it was a decade later for me to finally accept a personal cellphone. I worked close to home and was never far from my work NEXTEL or desk phone.

My grandparents kept their rotary phone in the guest room until their death, and now my uncle has it. I liked using it once in a while for the novelty. I found it funny that the first "portable phones" and a few other non-Bell phones had an option for pulse dialing as well.

[kphoger]

I think all of the trash collection companies around here give people the trash cans to use.  I can't recall ever seeing a non-branded trash can in Wichita, except for use as a second one when the main one is full.

[bandit957]

My apartment building provides its own dumpsters in the alley. But at my old apartment, I had to get my own trash can, and we didn't have an alley.

[DTComposer]

We did a pretend post office setup in my 6th grade classroom (part of a whole "society" we set up during rainy days). One of the students was the "postmaster" and all notes went to them who then delivered them around the room.

I was more fascinated by the rotary phone at my grandparents house.

At one point in the mid-1980s my dad had the then-current touch-tone phone, a rotary phone that he moved into the garage, a cordless phone (complete with telescoping antenna), and his grandparents' wall-mounted crank phone from about 1910 - couldn't dial out with it, of course, but still worked for speaking and listening.
The crank phone is still on the wall - not sure if it still works.

[kphoger]

Yesterday evening, we were reading in the Bible as a family, finishing up the book of Colossians.  And we came to these three verses:

Tychicus will tell you all about my affairs;  he is a beloved brother and faithful minister and fellow servant in the Lord.  I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are and that he may encourage your hearts, and with him Onesimus, the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of yourselves.  They will tell you of everything that has taken place here.  [Col 4:7-9]

So I asked the kids how they thought people back in the ancient Roman Empire sent letters from city to city.  Of course, the correct answer is that they just had to wait until someone they knew was going that way, then entrust them to personally deliver the letter when they arrived—and to share verbally any other news not contained in the letter.  And then I asked them, 'But what if you didn't know anyone going that way till five months later?'  Colossae was more than 1100 miles from Rome, by way of a combination of sea voyage and land route.  Yet here in this skip-right-over-it passage, we see that Paul didn't just wait for someone to head that way, but he personally sent at least two of his companions to carry the letter all that way.

Anyway, that prompted me to ask them how we send a letter from city to city today.  Of course, they were amused at the notion that, if you mail a letter to a neighbor a block away, then it goes to the post office first.  They had a decent understanding of how letters get from house to house within a city but, when I asked how a letter from Wichita to Des Moines gets there, they were a little stumped at first.  I'm sorry to say, I didn't explain ZIP codes to them.  Maybe I should.

[Takumi]

I was more fascinated by the rotary phone at my grandparents house.

We had a functional rotary phone at our house in my parents' room. Not our main phone obviously, but I definitely used it for the "novelty" of it.

There's still a functional rotary phone in my kitchen, dating back to at least the early 1970s since it has the house's former phone number listed with a 703 area code, but it hasn't been connected to a line since my grandpa's death in 2011.

[GaryV]

I was more fascinated by the rotary phone at my grandparents house.

We had a functional rotary phone at our house in my parents' room. Not our main phone obviously, but I definitely used it for the "novelty" of it.

For some of us used to those things, the new Touchtone phone was the "novelty".

EDIT regarding trash cans: We now have been supplied with roller bins for regular trash and for recycling. But we still have to provide our own receptacle for yard waste. They really want you to put a sticker on the can to let them know it's yard waste. Typically we make sure a stick or two are sticking out of the top of the can and the truck operators can see it's yard waste.

[kphoger]

What are everyone's thoughts about Eircode, which is the postal code system that Ireland developed?  It launched in 2014, and each seven-digit postal code identifies not just a neighborhood but an individual address.  While you could theoretically use only the postal code, that's not actually allowed.

[english si]

What are everyone's thoughts about Eircode, which is the postal code system that Ireland developed?  It launched in 2014, and each seven-digit postal code identifies not just a neighborhood but an individual address.  While you could theoretically use only the postal code, that's not actually allowed.

It would have been better if it used the logic of the UK postcode system (which Dublin uses the early form of (postal districts, which only existed in big cities), going so far as defining areas of the inner city*, which moved into Eircode as all Dublin addresses' codes begin Dxx) rather than having routing keys semi-randomly assigned and are purely administrative. Why is Cork using T, not C (and not using the 4 old postal districts at all)? It's not even the case that, say, codes beginning with A form a connected area, let alone that A has a link to that area.

Certainly having individual buildings covered helps given a lack of house numbers or names (or even road names) in a lot of places in the Republic.

My 7-character (they do vary in size between 6 and 8 (or 9)) UK postcode is about 10 houses**. They probably could have made it a finer grain if they wanted to almost everywhere in the country, but it's nearly sufficient just to use the postcode - a house number will do in nearly all cases with just a postcode, though they'd prefer you to include a road (and online forms are much more strict in their address requirements, with town and all sorts of superfluous information - but you can fill them with nonsense as they don't check they are real places, only caring about the actually required info). Any career posties who'd been doing that round for a few weeks would be able to get post delivered without any more info than a name and postcode without much effort. Though that's harder with people getting less post and more delivery companies, so there's less learning the names of the people in each house due to less things with that name on being delivered.

*For instance my brother would say he lived in 'Dublin 4' when he lived in Ireland, and his Eircode began D04.
**some are less, some are more, but not too much more. Some big/important buildings have several postcodes. The BBC Television Centre had a whole sector (W12 6) so could assign whatever 2 letters it wanted to at the end of the postcode and so could match programmes to the letters. Not least as it was its own internal mail system to get it to the right desk.

[vdeane]

I'm sorry to say, I didn't explain ZIP codes to them.  Maybe I should.

Feel free to let CGP Grey do that if you want.

[Scott5114]

Did anyone ever make a pretend postal service or phone system in their day?

I had a lot of fun coming up with the postal system for my D&D game, since it was important for the sake of the story for the players to be able to communicate long distances reasonably quickly, in a setting that has no phones, no radio, no Internet, no trains, and no cars.

The postal system can deliver packages hundreds of miles in a day or two, which is amazingly fast considering that the fastest mode of transport available is a horse. The players were able to discover how it works: there's a secret teleportation circle that links each county seat to the capital. So the postal system just delivers mail to the nearest county seat, teleports it to the capital, teleports it from there to the nearest county seat to the destination, and then delivers it from there.

If you know someone is traveling, but you don't know where they are exactly, and it's really important to get a message through to them, you can also pay the equivalent of $350 to send mail through "Pegasus service". The post office will dispatch a postal cleric to cast the "locate person" spell on your recipient, and will track them down to deliver the mail to them no matter where they are.

[Scott5114]

It would have been better if it used the logic of the UK postcode system (which Dublin uses the early form of (postal districts, which only existed in big cities), going so far as defining areas of the inner city*, which moved into Eircode as all Dublin addresses' codes begin Dxx) rather than having routing keys semi-randomly assigned and are purely administrative. Why is Cork using T, not C (and not using the 4 old postal districts at all)? It's not even the case that, say, codes beginning with A form a connected area, let alone that A has a link to that area.

The CGP Grey video in the post one down from yours answers this—the idea is that if every code is randomly assigned, then if there is a need for additional codes to be added in a given area, you are not stuck with the dilemma of choosing between having an odd-ball exception that doesn't match the rest of the system, or else forcing a disruptive renumbering to keep the system consistent.

[kphoger]

.

The CGP Grey video in the post one down from yours answers this—the idea is that if every code is randomly assigned, then if there is a need for additional codes to be added in a given area, you are not stuck with the dilemma of choosing between having an odd-ball exception that doesn't match the rest of the system, or else forcing a disruptive renumbering to keep the system consistent.

But he's British.  His answer is bound to be, "But that's not how it's done."

[english si]

The CGP Grey video in the post one down from yours answers this—the idea is that if every code is randomly assigned, then if there is a need for additional codes to be added in a given area, you are not stuck with the dilemma of choosing between having an odd-ball exception that doesn't match the rest of the system, or else forcing a disruptive renumbering to keep the system consistent.

Except we in the UK very rarely come across either problem expanding the system - not least because there's an awful lot of spare room and the back end, where its local postie knowledge, is pretty much random (and with lots of stuff to not get flummoxed by typos).

The closest thing to an oddball exception is things like the E20 postcode area for the Olympic Park being added, because it broke the (much earlier) logic of the London postcodes that the numbers are the district post offices in alphabetical order (some of which are tenuously named - especially all the 1 ones which are the innermost). It still tells you East London, and so the main logic stayed.

About the only renumbering (OK, NPT became NP9 and CRO became CO0 when early drafts were brought into the final standard) was the SO postcode area which had a couple of single digit areas changed to four or five double digit areas (and some inner London codes getting letters added to the outward half so it's SW1A rather than SW1) to (I believe the old codes would still work, because the second half stayed the same and the repeats between them are in new codes that never had the old ones) allow for growth.

Those area's post codes have changed once more than the normal zero, but their phone area codes have also changed once more than the normal once in that same 50 year period (and a lot more buildings had to change their area code twice than have changed their postcode once).

But he's British.  His answer is bound to be, "But that's not how it's done."

If they had trashed the preexisting Dublin numbers to go properly random (as they did with Cork), it would be obvious that it was a familiar RoI trope of 'we have to do it differently to the British' - the flip side of the 'but that's not how its done' that you (incorrectly) accuse me of holding.

It's just wholly unnecessary to have random 'this is the rough region' bits - there's even more space in the Irish system than the British system to have something adaptable for growth but also has a sanity check on the rough region bit with some sort of vaguely appropriate letter. Like how Dublin has the D to say "this is a Dublin address" - the machine might not care, but the people putting down their address would prefer something less random. They kept the D for a reason - because its beneficial, but refused to give the rest of the country that benefit!

The only good thing about the random letter is that there is only one outward Eircode that matches an outward Postcode (W12 Newbridge and W12 Shepherd's Bush) - which is presumably why they skip B, G, L, M (Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester over the water) in their random letter assignment. If that was the reason for the random letters, then I'd accept it, but the reason of 'growth' for the randomness is just naff. You can have a lot of growth with some sort of logic.

I didn't know the last bits of Eircode is coordinates, which is nicer than the random letters we get in the UK. But it does suggest that Eircode understand that randomness isn't needed for growth. Sure, the UK has a lot of potential for growth (and/or precision beyond what they decided to offer) with the random two letter assignments within a sector, but coordinates allow both precision and growth 'despite' order and logic rather than randomness.

[GaryV]

The CGP Grey video in the post one down from yours answers this—the idea is that if every code is randomly assigned, then if there is a need for additional codes to be added in a given area, you are not stuck with the dilemma of choosing between having an odd-ball exception that doesn't match the rest of the system, or else forcing a disruptive renumbering to keep the system consistent.

Sounds like the Interstate numbers.

[MikeTheActuary]

Those are probably the same sort of people who move into my neighborhood and then complain that they are not provided with a trash can upon arrival.

Every place I have lived has provided both trash and recycling bins.

Thrice in my life (my childhood home in Memphis, the first place we rented in CT, and our current home), I went through the transition where initially we had to provide our own trash barrels and garbage men would manually empty them into the trucks, and then the trash service shifted to semi-automation requiring standardized trash bins to be assigned.

Other places I've lived either relied on dumpster service, or in one case there was no trash service (you burned your trash, or hauled it to the dump yourself).  I'm not sure what was done at my very first home, in Illinois...but I was only 5 when we moved away.   I assume it was provide-your-own-bin manual trash pickup.

On the original topic of the thread....growing up in Memphis, we lived in an area served by the last exchange to be upgraded to support direct long-distance dialing.  To call my grandparents, we had to dial the operator and give the number.  Of course, this was also back before cheap long-distance, so we only really did that for holidays and family birthdays.  My mom refused to pay extra for touch tone; when I got a phone in my room as a teen (after customers were allowed to provide their own phones), I had a slimline push-button phone with the tone/pulse option set to pulse.   It wasn't until I went to college that I got to use touch-tone on a regular basis.

When I moved to a small town in Alabama for my first job after college (1993), folks in that town took pride that the year before they had finally retired the party lines that had served homes outside the town center.

[kphoger]

the flip side of the 'but that's not how its done' that you (incorrectly) accuse me of holding

I originally misinterpreted your post below as being like, Silly American, that's not how it's done.

True, and we wouldn't typically use muffins for marmite because of that. Toast typically as a base for the marmite and butter

[english si]

Those area's post codes have changed once more than the normal zero, but their phone area codes have also changed once more than the normal once in that same 50 year period (and a lot more buildings had to change their area code twice than have changed their postcode once).

Completely forgot that London's area codes changed 3 times (01 until 1990, 071/081 between 1990 and 1995, 0171/0181 between 1995 and 2000, 020 since 1999 (there was a few months when both 01x1 and 020 codes worked)).

It all was sensible and clever moves, but there were a lot of them in quick succession 25-35 years ago and it looks like an ever-changing mess (especially if you grew up in the 90s). Tom Scott wanted to do a rant, but ended up a lot less annoyed about it.

[SP Cook]

The reason rotary phones could not dial long distance when the area code splits happened, had to do with the area code system itself.  Area codes under the 1947 system always had a 0 or a 1 as the middle digit, which was a signal to the switch that it was an area code, and not the "prefix code", which is the first three numbers of your local phone number.  Further no area code or prefix code could start with a 0 or a 1, as these were for the operator ( 0 ) or a switch signal for long distance ( 1 ).  When they ran out of numbers they fixed this limitation, but rotary phone switches could not handle it. 

Off topic, but Ma Bell put thought into the system, if you think about how rotary phones worked.  States with more than one area code got ones with a 1 in the middle, and states with only one got a 0.  The shortest number of pulls went to NYC (212), the shortest single "state" code went to DC (212), with similar short pulls for places like LA (213), Chicago (312) etc. with the large unpopulated states/jurisdictions getting the longest pulls, like 701 for ND, 902 for Atlantic Canada, 801 for Utah, etc.  The interesting deal from a demographic standpoint is that no southern state, unless you count Texas, needed more than one area code.  305 covered all of Florida, for example, as Florida had only 1.7M residents in the 1940 census.  While states like KS, IA, WI and MO all needed more than one.  Ma got the coming demographic shift totally wrong.

--

When I was a kid the phone company would come to social studies class in about the 7th grade with a switchboard it would set up in the hall way, and a set of telephones, including a pay phone, they would set up and the teacher and a phone company rep would teach the kids "phone etiquette".  They quit doing it before I made it to 7th grade, but I remember the older kids taking the class.  There was a work book that had stuff about area codes and how pay phones worked and how great Ma Bell was, IIRC.

[kphoger]

The reason rotary phones could not dial long distance when the area code splits happened, had to do with the area code system itself.  Area codes under the 1947 system always had a 0 or a 1 as the middle digit, which was a signal to the switch that it was an area code, and not the "prefix code", which is the first three numbers of your local phone number.  Further no area code or prefix code could start with a 0 or a 1, as these were for the operator ( 0 ) or a switch signal for long distance ( 1 ).  When they ran out of numbers they fixed this limitation, but rotary phone switches could not handle it.

And yet pulse dialing was still supported by many providers even after area codes started splitting.  Right now, I'm reading a 2019 forum post by someone who said that he was still able in that year to use two rotary phones with his AT&T BellSouth service.

Furthermore, Max said that his family's issue was due to an area code split near Detroit in around 1990.  I'm assuming he means the creation of the 810 area code, which indeed has a 1 in the middle position, in 1993.  It wasn't until 1997 that the 248 and 734 area codes were created.

[1995hoo]

I assumed SP Cook was talking about the newer generation of area code splits that began in the mid-1990s when the second digit was no longer restricted to zero or one (the first one I remember was 540 in Virginia). There were other area code splits before that, perhaps most notably in 1984 when most of New York City was split off from 212 to become 718, but those didn't introduce any overall technical issues because they maintained the existing rules.

I remember in the early 1990s the phone company in central Virginia allowed you to call long-distance within the 804 area code by dialing 1 plus the seven-digit phone number—for example, when I was attending UVA I could call my brother, who attended William & Mary in Williamsburg, by dialing 1-###-#### (I have no idea now what his number was). Phone companies that allowed that had to abolish it with the arrival of the new "unrestricted middle digit" area codes.

BTW, SP Cook made one error: DC didn't have the shortest-pull "state" area code (202)—New Jersey did with 201, which is one pull shorter than 202.

[kernals12]

I was more fascinated by the rotary phone at my grandparents house.

You must be younger than I thought, because rotary phones were a common thing well into the 1980s

[kphoger]

I assumed SP Cook was talking about the newer generation of area code splits that began in the mid-1990s when the second digit was no longer restricted to zero or one (the first one I remember was 540 in Virginia).

But, as I said, that didn't prevent many providers from supporting rotary phone pulse dialing even afterward.  I just searched Cox Communication's internal network of articles and found this regarding HD Voice:  "Older phones, such as rotary phones, are not supported by the HD Voice feature."  The most recent refresh date on that article was March 2022.