LAST EDITED ON Jul-26-18 AT 01:05 PM (EDT)
 
>Try explaining party lines. I double-dog-dare you. :)

"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.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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