My call is W7EBC. 73's!

My exchange was TUrner8/ 888-XXXX. I too will never forget that. Friends close by had either 794, 796, 647, 342 or 343. Back then you could tell where a person lived just by the exchange.

My childhood phone number only used the first two letters and was HOpkins 7-1788. Gosh, I've forgotten a lot of trivial stuff, but not that for some reason.

NO! Just in an area where three different phone companies were competing against each other. That competition is still raging today as my landline phone is Frontier but my neighbor just half a mile up the road has Verizon. I can call other phones in the same area code for free but when I must dial 1+ another area code it is a long distance charge. 845, 914, 212, 516, 570 codes surround me. My brother lives 20 miles from me but is a LD call. No cell service here.

I just remembered that metal tab that acted as a stop when dialing was a ground point and worked great as a ground for a crystal set... a what!? LOL!

Were you on a state line?

No doubt.

Also "blue box".

Amateur Radio, CD, ARES, MARS; when all else fails ... . Collision sense multiple access, (thicknet & thinnet) ... .

Do you remember beep talk? The busy signal was shared by all phones. Dial your own number, get a busy signal, then talk between beeps with strangers. Big fun. Met a lot of interesting people back in the day - circa 1962-63.

I used to keep my slide rule on top of my monitor. I'd tell the young engineers that if the power went out, I could still compute.

This may be the "code datasheet" referred to : http://www.rtty.com/CODECARD/codecrd1... The BAUDOT 5-level code had only 32 possibilities, not enough for the entire alphabet (upper case only) plus numbers and punctuation. There was a letters/numbers key which would shift between the two codings, allowing for 64 possibilities. I remember when a shift was missed there would be a bunch of garbage characters. I think there are still some amateur radio guys using RTTY (radioteletype).

And if you were really on top of things and had spare time, you could dial by forcing the off-hook and simply tapping the wires together to simulate the dial clicking.

Teletype is a telephone typewriter, with signals that trigger letters.

https://www.alphr.com/what-is-tty-mode/

Back in the day, teletype was the medium of digital communication. Media outlets received breaking news via wire service teletypes such as Associated Press (AP) ort United Press International (UPI). That was a one direction service. Western Union offered a bi-diredctional service (Telex or TWX). Connected to the Western Union network, one machine could direct dial another Telex machine and send text messages, essentially private telegrams. "Cable" was short for cablegram, I think referring to international telegram. In the early days of computing these machines also could be setup as as data terminals for remote access to computers. It was not ASCII, it was 5-level BAUDOT code, messages could be "stored" on paper punch tape (the machines had paper tape capability so messages could be "pre-typed" to save online time. and cost). It was how I first accessed "dial-up" computers 50 years ago. Cutting edge technology...

In south Alabama as a kid during the Fifties, I recall the first three "numbers" being the letters "SYC" and if you gave someone your phone number you'd say,
"Call me back at (for example) sycamore-2468."
I suppose PIN would stand for "pine" instead of a yet to be invented pin-number.

Funny.

Up until now, it never dawned on me old dino that modern day 17-year-olds has to figure out what I knew how to do by the age of seven.

This was one of the funniest videos I've ever seen. I suppose it's inevitable, but I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it!

Do you remember "The Question Man" on the old Steve Allen show? Here's one of my favorite answers: BUtterfield 8-3000. What's the question?

Little known fact: amateur radio is responsible for coming up with the coding for common ethernet protocol.

The two-letters identified the CO, for example LO = Logan. So people would say their number was Logan-12345.

The link takes me to a bunch of ads. No Twx examples. However, I believe the Twx are old TTY (teletype) codes used by Western Union - sort of an ASCII code. They're obsolete for decades now.

YUP! Around 7-8th grade we finally got new Private lines and letter designations before the number. Depending on what phone company owned the lines in a close town determined if the call you made was local and free or a long distance call. I could call a friend in the next town over but could not call my GF who lived closer but in the opposite direction in another town. AT&T was on one side and Bell Telephone was on the other side.

Does anyone know what a cable or Twx (Telex) are? This datasheet was from when I was 19 and starting to use datasheet, but I've never heard of a Cable code. https://postimg.cc/GBJcmJc3
Is this something people actually used? I remember rotary phones and later reps faxing datasheets, but what on earth is a cable? I googled reasonably hard, and couldn't find it.