"John Shelley" wrote in message
...
Martin Underwood wrote:
snip
At least in the UK we got rid of local codes for neighbouring
exchanges: these varied from one place to another - so you might
precede a person's number with a 9 from exchange A to B but precede
it with 61 from exchange C to B. I worked out fairly early on that it
was possible to dial the STD code from *any* exchange, even when a
local code existed. I've heard it said that before local codes were
abolished it was possible to go from one end of the country to the
other in hops by dialling each local code in turn - and that the
resulting trunk call was then charged at the local rate ;-)

That was possible, but as you used local links all the way many repeaters
(amplifiers) were bypassed which resulted in a very quiet call with lots
of
background noise.

Ah, those were the days:

- Telephones with dials that took forever to return so you could dial the
next number - a real pain when you had to keep re-dialling because the
number was engaged.

- A loooooooooong delay after dialling the last digit before you got a
ringing tone, as the relays chugged away

- The brrrrrr dialling tone that was often so faint that you didn't know if
you'd "got a line" - at least the modern 350 Hz + 450 Hz dialling tone is
audible.

- Button A / Button B or pay-on-answer callboxes: remember those wretched
pips

- Recorded announcements made by women with cold, unwelcoming, cut-glass,
plummy accents who sounded as if they were speaking from the moon. They
probably came from the same place that trained the dragonesses in my local
library!


At least things are better these days.

One thing I wish they'd sort out: if someone calls you and they fail to put
their receiver back, the line remains connected for ages, even after you've
put your phone back, blocking you from making an outgoing call. When my
grandma had a stroke a few years ago, she phoned me for help but forgot to
put her phone back. I eventually had to go next door to phone for an
ambulance because the line wouldn't disconnect. Surely it's not difficult to
enginner things so *either* handset being replaced drops the line - or else
to shorten the delay to just a few seconds if it's needed to avoid the line
dropping if you accidentally blip the handset switch.