More interesting historical information from Relayautomatic.

Re Strowger: I was brought up to pronounce that name with Strow rhyming with 'brow' and a soft g in 'ger'. However, co-incidentally, I was watching some video this week and noticed that Americans pronounce it with Strow rhyming with 'crow' and a hard g in 'ger'.

(And I note that Brad's photos in post #1 are no longer showing).

Photos uploaded again. It looks like a few may be missing from when the server lost it's original hard disc. Thankfully I have them all backed up - just not always archived in the best way possible.

I also agree on Relayautomatic's posts. Lots of great information there.

I'd have to agree that numbers are easier to remember than a jumble of letters. I find the words in some 1300 numbers difficult to remember, especially those that are longer than the six digit number suffix. All Australian phone numbers are ten digits, including area codes, except some special numbers and even at this length they are easier to remember as a string of digits than a word that is often mispelt by marketing gurus to try and get it as short as possible and such numbers cannot be easily dialled from phones with rotary dials because the lettering sequence is different, even on dials with three letters assigned to each number.

I still remember as a kid when our house had a two digit area code and six digit number, eight in all, connected to the Homebush, NSW exchange. (02) 76 XXXX - very easy to remember back then.

One other thing I noticed years ago is that for some reason capital city area codes in Australia were never harmonised with the way numbering was allocated to communications callsigns and postcodes. EG: Why did Brisbane cop 07 as an area code when it perhaps should have been 04, remembering that even though 04 is allocated to digital mobile phones, they didn't exist at the time the Postmaster General's Department would have been responsible for number allocations.

Not so sure about a combination of letters and numbers being harder to remember. I can still recall XX-9999 format numbers from the 1950s for our home, my grandparents' home and my father's office.

And I can still recall a bunch of XXX-999 style car number plates from way back as well.

However, it's only logical that full numerics are used these days, and I dislike and don't bother with the 1300 XXXX XXXX style numbers because I find dialing letters on number pads a royal PITA.

I suppose the debate over what is easier to remember is similar to that with computer networks. The current addressing protocol for computers only knows and cares for numbers which is why a computer's address looks something like the address for this website, namely 123.243.0.241. However from the earliest days of the Internet the powers that be realised that people would easily forget these numbers if the Internet became as popular as it is today and developed a fairly rudimentary addressing system called hosts, based on easy to remember names, with a suffix of three letters. Hosts was simple but easily outgrown by the growth of the Internet and this was replaced with the Domain Name System, or DNS for short. DNS still matches names with numbers but it does so in a way that is easy to update and the scalability is limited only by the number of names and numbers available.

So what we have is the fact that http://vintage-radio.com.au/ being easier for a person to remember than http://123.243.0.241/. It's all academic though. Phones and web browsers have practically unlimited space in memory and 'favourites' respectively.

I remember most of the number plates I've had over the years. Perhaps with respect to both phone numbers and Internet addresses it is a case of numbers and letters being easy to remember in small quantities but more difficult in large quantites, hence the need for phone books and search engines.

Hi,
Do they still work, and what was the plan to overcome the problem, and produce DTMF tones?

although like with extension cables, noone need ever know,
but I would have thought it illegal to connect such a device to your phone socket.

Does it count a potential ten pulses and then go beep?

Both my phones still work. As they are still connected to the copper network they do not need any equipment to support them. The digital exchanges still recognise pulse dialling.

It'll be a different story when fibre takes over though.

The Internet DNS is entirely "virtualised" in that the relation between a domain name and an IP address is only established through a lookup table on a nameserver. It is quite possible to have any number of domain names pointing to the same IP address, but of course it would be chaos if the numeric IP addresses were not carefully allocated to avoid clashes and to point to a unique host machine through a resolvable switching route.

Actually the virtual name principles were established first for the US telephone system when direct-dialling was put in place between the various private networks. The private networks had different uncoordinated numbering schemes, so a central authority was set up to create a new virtualised number system to enable dialling between networks. I understand this system also applies now in the mobile networks in Australia so that subscribers can switch telcos and keep the same number, and even to the fixed line exchanges which no longer need one-to-one line correlations to specific switch sequences.

I remember as a kid visiting the Institute of Technology? at the museum in Swanston St, Melbourne, where you could watch a mechanical step-switch in a glass case operating as you dialled your mate from a handset at the other end of the glass case.

Not so much fun staring at a modern exchange server module with just a blinking light or two if you are lucky.

Maven

I have what is essentially an IP phone now.
We are on Telstra digital business, and the phone plugs
into the router they provided.

I remember you used to be able to bang out a phone
number with the hangup button if you tapped it quick enough.

What's actually happening on the phone line there?
Can that be easily reproduced with a small circuit?

Pulse dialing still works fine on a 1936 232 type phone with original circuitry using the Optus broadband network.

This one here is minus it's bell-box.

What's actually happening on the phone line there?

Pulse dialling us essentially opening and closing the line loop at a regular pace. The diallers are mechanically governed to ensure that the pulse width and rate is regular.

Tapping the switch hook also opens and closes the line loop, except that you need to get the timing right to avoid dialling a wrong number.

This system was designed to operate electromechanical switches at the exchange. Nowadays it's all electronic switching in the exchanges so if pulse dialling is detected it's converted to tones at the exchange before being processed.

Can that be easily reproduced with a small circuit?

There was a fellow selling pulse to tone converter boxes, however these are not ACMA (A-Tick) approved.

I should explain myself clearer because I don't know how many, if anyone would be familiar with this thing:

Image Link

There might be people here making effort to avoid modern technology for all I know.
I am making an assumption, basically, this is what I think we
all end up with.

We had an ordinary phone, but when we went on this business plan, no phone gets a dial tone when directly
plugged into our phone socket anymore because we don't
have a phone line, we just have a DSL connection to this box.

The yellow network cable is for a data phone they provided.
The pinkish label with grey cord and earth globe logo is the
DSL connection that plugs directly to our phone socket,
and the grey label with Black Beauty on it is for your
current phone equipment that doesn't work if you plug it into the wall.

What I believe is happening is the router is doing whatever
it takes on the "obsolete" phone sockets to keep that
equipment happy, and translating your conversation to
data before it leaves your house.

I'd be interested in opinions about whether or not that
socket is isolated from the phone line, and if that changes the situation where the law applies or not?
When you got a modem card for a computer, you weren't allowed to tamper with the modem housing, but that didn't mean you weren't allowed to modify the computer it was installed in.

Those Cisco modems will only allow an old phone to work if you still have a traditional PSTN phone service. They will not work with VOIP services and you'd need a VOIP phone for that.

Many new modems of all brands have these extra sockets now so people can transition from old to new easier as they connect to the fibre services - where modems like this get switched to run as routers only and then plug into the fibre modem.

Just testing video links.
They don't work, but cut & paste into the address bar does.

Video links? Where?

Just a random YouTube link to see what happened to it.
I should have said that it was edited out ;)

So I'm a fone phreak now, of the variety that doesn't
connect to phone lines, or try to steal anything,
and wasn't here for the 60's
Is there a special club for that, or is this it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyB8MtNg_6I.

It doesn't connect to any phone line. I don't even have a
rotary phone, so it has to be an off-line educational
experiment.
It does work coupled through my cordless handset with speaker/microphone coupling.

Interesting how the cordless phone is isolated from
the phone network, and how there will always have to be
a cordless phone.

This one does the logic for how I'd anticipate the current
dubious one works, and an opening for a different idea.
I am under the impression that the hangup button and
the switch in the rotary dial do the same thing.

The first way buffers the phone number and sends DTMF,
then afterwards, any time before you hang up, individual
pulses are sent in case you are talking to a DTMF automated robot working for your bank.

The first way would have to be in control of the cordless
hang up button. If the DTMF wasn't sent with individual
rotary dial entries, you would lose the dial tone by the time the whole number is dialled.

Also I did a Triple Zero speed dial.
Zero is Ten, and the longest number to rotary dial.
So if the number dialled is "111", it is converted to "000".
This could happen a lot faster as long as there's no real
numbers beginning in "111".
Cheers, Art.