Old Phone Numbers

[Girl Toes]

How do old phone numbers, like "Jackson 8902" work. What did the jackson part mean, and was the number just as random as ours was today?? How did you dial it on a rotary phone??? What should I keep in mine when coming up with an acurate fictional old phone number??? What was the "555" equivilent of that day??? What was the 976 equivilent?
also, how did a giant switchboard, like new york city, operate efore dialing??? It wasn't just like calling Sarah on the Andy Griffith Show, was it??

Curiouser and curiouser....

[signorMars]

the "jackson" part was just a mnemonic device standing for the first two digits of the number. for example, in the movies you will always hear them say "Klondike 5, 2849" or something to that effect. Written out, klondike 5 is KL5. K & L are both on the number 5 on a phone, so Klondike 5 = 555. As for the switchboard, i THINK... not sure since i wasn't even close to alive then, that you pick up the phone and tell the operator what number to connect to, and they patch you in. and at that time, there werent really enough phone numbers to necessitate an area code, i guess.

[kcrusher]

www.phonespell.org

[Girl Toes]

No, that didn't help at all.

[wenzel.hellgren]

There were not area codes because there wasn't any long distance. Each town had it's own exchange that wasn't connected to anybody else.

[Girl Toes]

Ah. That was some great information. Thank you.

The only thing I would be confused about is, that would still make for a 7 digit number. Annd there is a what's his name... Allen Sherman?? Its slipping my mind, you know "Hello Mudda, Hello Fatha," he has another song complaining about AT&T's forcing us to now use long 7 digit numbers, and then area codes for long distance as well. It was from the early 60's, so I had the impression that numbers were shorter. I would wonder why if the numbers continued to be 7 digits, then why would we cease to use pnumonic deviced anymore.

Thank you.