In article , Martin Rich
writes
According to the BT archives, the handful of A/B button
phones in Scotland survived because they used radio links which didn't
support the meter pulsing necessary for the pay-on-answer phones.

Could it be that A/B phones could only be used for local calls?

There was a time in the mid-1970s when some rural exchanges still didn't
have Subscriber Trunk Dialling when most places did. I remember seeing a
placard in a phone box saying that local calls were 2p unlimited if STD
was not available, or 2p per [3 minutes, I think] if it was.

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In article , Graham J
writes
Does leaving out the 020 actually work reliably when you aren't using a BT
line or are redirecting calls via another provider?

It's an Ofcom requirement that you can leave out the area code when
dialling within the same code. [Note that mobile codes like 07973 are
not "area codes" for this reason.] So from any 020 line it is possible
to dial all other 020 numbers without the code.

This applies equally in 023 and 028, where not all intra-code calls are
local.

On a sort of related subject, at one London based company I worked for we
were moving to a brand new office and so having a new PABX installed. The
IT Manager hit on the idea of having the code for the outside line be "0"
[...]

That's how the PBX at Demon worked for many years; you dialled an
internal number or an external one without having to think.

With a bit of special handling for external numbers not
beginning with "0"

IIRC, our usual practice was to dial 141 in front of these (since that
was recognised and also escaped out to an external line, just like 0).

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That's how the PBX at Demon worked for many years; you dialled an
internal number or an external one without having to think.

Ah, that would explain where the idea came from :-) There was me thinking
he'd come up with it for himself instead of bringing it with him :-)

"Clive D. W. Feather" wrote in message
...

Could it be that A/B phones could only be used for local calls?

You could only use them for local calls. STD didn't exist, so you had to
call the operator. She (or he at night) told you how much to insert for your
trunk call, and when to press button A.
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On 5 Jan 2005 09:49:13 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

Martin Rich writes:

[33 lines snipped]

it's possible - and I wonder if anybody reading this actually knows -
that the last A/B button boxes disappeared at around the same time as
the last pay-on-answer phones.

When we started going to the West Coast of Scotland in 1984, they still
had A/B phone boxes in places (to our astonishment). They disappeared
shortly thereafter.

My last sighting of an A/B button box in the UK was on the *North*
coast of Scotland - to similar astonishment - circa 1989: we were
definitely travelling in a car that I'd acquired in April 1988 so it
wasn't earlier than that.

Conversely I remember modern phone boxes - pre-payment, unused coins
returned, LCD displays saying how much credit was outstanding - being
easy to find in Brodick on the Isle of Arran in summer 1986, when a
trip to the West of Scotland coincided with a family hiatus that
required a few long phone calls to my parents in London

Martin

In article ,
Martin Rich wrote:

My last sighting of an A/B button box in the UK was on the *North*
coast of Scotland - to similar astonishment - circa 1989: we were
definitely travelling in a car that I'd acquired in April 1988 so it
wasn't earlier than that.

I remember a news story about the last Button A/Button B phone being
decommissioned - I think it was in the early 1990s.

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In article , Richard J.
writes
Precisely. That's why your original statement (which you conveniently
snipped) that you could call London Transport enquiries *from a
telephone in London* by dialling "222 1234" was not true if the
telephone was in the 0181 part of London.

OK, I understand your point now: I should have said "from a telephone
in the central telephone zone of London".


--
Clive Page

In article , Charlie Pearce
writes
But the area codes were *never* 0207 and 0208 - this is just a (very)
commonly-held misconception because the changeover wasn't communicated
well enough.

Well we are getting in to questions of semantic, I fear, as to the
meaning of "dialling code". I still think that during the transition
period, when the local numbers were 7 digits long, and one could call
them by starting dialling 020... that, following the rules of the ITU
E.123, the space in the number should have preceded the local part of
the number, i.e. before the last seven digits. So that the number could
have been given either as 0171 xxx yyyy or with equal validity 0207 xxx
yyyy.

It wasn't until London got eight-digit local dialling that the former
code vanished, and the space moved to a point before the 7 (or 8). Of
course Oftel didn't support this, and it's a somewhat pedantic point,
but it seems undeniable, if you read E.123 carefully.

--
Clive Page

In article , (Terry
Harper) wrote:

Could it be that A/B phones could only be used for local calls?

You could only use them for local calls. STD didn't exist, so you had to
call the operator. She (or he at night) told you how much to insert for your
trunk call, and when to press button A.

And the only way the operator knew how much you put in was by listening to
the sound of the different coins dropping - quite an acquired skill, I should
think.

--
Peter Beale

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 22:54:01 +0000, Clive Page
wrote:

In article , Charlie Pearce
writes
But the area codes were *never* 0207 and 0208 - this is just a (very)
commonly-held misconception because the changeover wasn't communicated
well enough.

Well we are getting in to questions of semantic, I fear, as to the
meaning of "dialling code". I still think that during the transition
period, when the local numbers were 7 digits long, and one could call
them by starting dialling 020... that, following the rules of the ITU
E.123, the space in the number should have preceded the local part of
the number, i.e. before the last seven digits. So that the number could
have been given either as 0171 xxx yyyy or with equal validity 0207 xxx
yyyy.

I disagree - the number could have been given as either 0171 xxx yyyy
or 020 7xxx yyyy during the transition period, but you could only
choose to dial 0171 xxx yyyy, xxx yyyy or 020 7xxx yyyy.

Charlie

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