I mean, you lot rose up in bloody insurrection against exploitative financial arrangements. I thought that was the point.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Oh, yeah, I suppose anyone who's too young to have experienced the joy of dial-up Internet isn't likely to remember toll calls either. Technically this concept still exists—a commonly seen vestige in the US is all those numbers in area codes 800, 866, et al., which are still called "toll-free numbers" even though only people with very basic land line service still incur toll charges on non-local calls these days.

(I do on my land line, but it doesn't matter in practice, since I use my mobile phone for pretty much all my outgoing calls except the occasional fax to an insurance company or other organization for which it is still 1985.)

When I was a kid this was still a very big deal; long-distance calls from, for instance, where I lived to my grandparents' place up north cost something like 10¢ a minute during peak (for which read: standard business) hours when I was little, which added up mighty fast. The cost of gasoline being what it was back then, it often felt like it would be cheaper to just drive two hours and see them rather than call. There was even a PSA that the phone company ran on TV for many years, with a catchy jingle informing subscribers that "Five [n.b. as in "o'clock PM"] is when the rates go down!"

Even at the lower rates, it was possible to rack up astonishing phone bills with interstate long-distance calls well into the '90s. I... may have incurred a $300 one, one month, when I was at UMaine for the first time in 1994 and was sort-of-LDRing-or-something a girl who was going to Tufts. ($300 was a terrifying amount of money to me in 1994. That bill might have had a direct bearing on my decision to drop out of school... again... and take the first of the semi-random tech jobs I had through the rest of the '90s.)

These things leave deep scars. My father is still in the habit of ending phone calls as quickly as possible, even though we both have had smartphones with unlimited calling plans for years.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Faxes do have the small advantage of being sent directly. If I send an e-mail, it's hypothetically possible for one of those whackers to scan all the packets and reconstruct everything in it. Highly unlikely, from what I understand, but possible. Faxes can't be intercepted in such a fashion.

For organizations dealing with Protected Information, like social security numbers or medical files, this is very important.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Nowadays nearly everyone's on some variant of VoIP -anyway- even for fax, while email's nearly universally TLS encrypted in transit from any major mail carrier, so that's kinda switched over the past few years.

#cough

Anyway. My mom does billing info for my uncle's medical-related practice, and let's just say that interception in transit is the least of people's worries when it comes to PII being intercepted when talking to billing folks.

My dad holds the record by a long mile, but I did manage to keep 'em going for a solid 44 minutes one time.

The Wife was explaining this to a younger friend (really only about 10 years younger), about 10 years ago. My father-in-law was a rural pastor before he retired. Keeping The Old Biddies (tm) off the line while Pastor was trying to conduct church business with confidentiality issues was a constant battle.

She didn't believe us until she got home and researched it. Online. We got an apology email a few days later.

A lot of alcohol may have been involved. It was one of those parties.

"You know the General tab on an MMO's in-game chat window? Whole towns' phone service used to be basically that, except usually without as many Nazis and Chinese gold farmers."

Less flippantly, party lines have been featured as either plot hooks or comedy props in so many movies and TV shows that they have a certain cultural staying power, at least among people who willingly consume media older than they are. :)

SEE ALSO: The middle part of phone numbers in the United States, which is the part that originally denoted which local exchange the operator needed to connect with, used to have keywords in them, as in the title of the popular song from the 1940s, "PEnnsylvania 6-5000", which was the phone number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The capital E is not a typo, as only the first two letters of the exchange name were really part of the phone number; the rest was just a mnemonic to help people remember them. When direct dialing came along, the letters had to be mapped to numbers so that phones wouldn't have to have 36-hole dials, which is where the "2 ABC / 3 DEF /etc." thing we still see on phones today comes from.

Probably no one could have predicted, when this decision was made, that it would eventually be turned around backward and used to enable marketing people to seek out numbers like 1-800-FLOWERS (an actual number for a florist ordering network).

Most, if not all, of the original mappings were preserved when the Bell System went to all-number dialing in the 1960s; for instance, the Hotel Pennsylvania's phone number is still 736-5000 today.

I'm not sure what the exchange name here in Millinocket was. Oddly, it seems it wasn't "MIllinocket", since the exchange prefix here (there's only one for the whole town) doesn't start with 64.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I mean, I glarked from context that the hero was making a phone call, but your explanation does reveal that what I thought was a typo (double caps) in the text was not, in fact, a typo. So, thanks. :)

(Project Gutenberg has SO MUCH STUFF, it'll take me a while to get through this list.)

--sofaspud
--there are some strange, strange gems in that thar slushpile, I tell you what

The exchange prefix is 723, right? That's got to be either PA3 or RA3, since nothing else would be pronounceable.

To bring this thread back around full circle -- I bet you could find an old telephone directory at your local municipal library!

Probably not that old; shelf space is limited, after all. They might have something like that at the Fogler or Bangor Public, though. Millinocket numbers have been listed in the "Bangor Area" phone book since time immemorial, despite the towns being ~70 miles apart, population density in northern Maine being what it is.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That's an excellent example. Except the last video games I played were on an at Atari 5200. In the late '80s. (No judgement; video games just aren't my thing.)

>Less flippantly, party lines have been featured as either plot hooks
>or comedy props in so many movies and TV shows that they have a
>certain cultural staying power, at least among people who willingly
>consume media older than they are. :)

You'd think so, but party lines are a conversation The Wife and I have repeated multiple times. The "media older than they are" is a big hurdle for those punks, who won't. get off. my LAWN.

(Explaining 50 years of Iron Man history over breakfast to my boys this morning might have me inna mood.)

<SNIP phone number historical tutorial>
Interesting; I knew some of that, but not all of it.

The Yooper town I grew up in only required using the last four digits of a phone number to dial within our prefix until at least '91.

(ETA: Spelling. Always spelling.)

I gathered from context that the challenge involved explaining the phenomenon to people who hadn't been born yet at the time you're talking about, anyway.

>(Explaining 50 years of Iron Man history over breakfast to my boys
>this morning might have me inna mood.)

Ye gods. I've been an Iron Man fan since issue #162 of the original series and I can't even imagine why you would want to do that, let alone actually do it. :)

>The Yooper town I grew up in only required using the last four digits
>of a phone number to dial within our prefix until at least '91.

Yup, my hometown did as well. The pay phones in town still had dials and Touch-Tone dialing wasn't available for residential customers until they changed over the local exchange's switchgear at around that same time, at which point we finally went to seven-digit local dailing.

I remember when I was a kid, calling my grandparents (or calling home from their house, when I was staying over)—we had direct dialing, but there was still about a 20-second delay between dialing and having it ring at the other end, during which you could hear the network constructing the circuit, switch by switch, exchange by exchange.

Phones also rang differently based on whether it was a local or long-distance call incoming. Local calls gave one long ring, pause, one long ring, while toll calls gave two short, pause, two short.

Here's a trick from those days I just remembered: if you picked up a phone in the old four-digit-local/dial phone days, dialed 987, and hung up, it would make all the extensions in the house ring. If you and, say, the person downstairs in the kitchen then picked up, you could have an intercom conversation.

(This is presumably the mechanism that the stalker used in When a Stranger Calls. "The calls are coming from inside the house!")

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.