Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his
longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.
But for most of Woz's life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges with
three matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like
221-1111. Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Woz
begin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months of
scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone
number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.
The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong
numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to
misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was
never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or,
not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a
television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or
Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.
Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman
say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver
was snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: the
hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They
were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of
the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep
beep beep beep."
The children of America were making their first prank call.
And the person who answered the phone was Woz.
For the benefit of people reading this on mobile, here is the text from the above comment without the indentation:
Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and hislongtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.
But for most of Woz's life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges withthree matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like221-1111. Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Wozbegin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months ofscheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phonenumber, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.
The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrongnumbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible tomisdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there wasnever anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or,not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of atelevision in the background, or somebody talking softly in English orSpanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.
Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a womansay, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiverwas snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: thehundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. Theywere picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom ofthe handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beepbeep beep beep."
The children of America were making their first prank call.
...and this reminds me of the time I emailed 'Fred' at 'gmail.com'. Actually 'Fred's' email was 'email.fred@gmail.com' however I mis-heard the 'email.' part even after verbally confirming the address as it seemed too concise.
So I send expected email, to then get a reply from the real 'fred@gmail.com', this obviously not being my contractor friend. Turns out that this happens all the time - well considered, properly written emails of significance had been arriving in 'Fred's' inbox, each of them having to be politely returned as 'Fred' was ethical that way...
There are downsides to 'ideal' email addresses as well as 'ideal' phone numbers.
I have an email address that is the.myfirstname.mylastname@popularservice.com
I repeatedly emailed myself from my work email address to myfistname.mylastname@popularservice.com - I kept forgetting the "the." at the start of my own email address. I only realised when the owner of the other address politely wrote back asking me to stop doing this. I hadn't noticed because the emails were just autohotkey script backups and xml files containing machine settings for a laser cutter and I wasn't really paying attention as to whether I had received them or not.
Anyway, I got tired of trying to spell english-word email address to people over the phone, so I registered a domain and now have an unambiguous email address a364 athingy k45j dotthingy com - it's heaps easier to say and write down and nobody has a similar address because I own the domain.
I live in a country where emergency services are completely unreliable, so my main experience of 911 / 999 emergency services is from television and films, and I've noticed a fair amount of friction in the phone call process, especially when it comes to verbally communicating the address. In addition to the phone number, wouldn't it be useful to also have native apps for this which optionally grant GPS access and camera access at the touch of a button?
If you want to learn more about this, then I suggest reading about the several and various initiatives that there have been over the past few years, in the U.K., the U.S.A., and elsewhere, to deal with with the problem of VOIP and mobile telephones. They have included things such as (for example) the idea that the immediately upstream ISP, for VOIP, populates an ESDB/ALIDB with location data that it knows because it knows the physical location of the VOIP connection to its network.
The names that you want to start with are "Enhanced 911" and "Next Generation 911".
Yikes, the font on that website is incredibly distracting. Hard enough that I went and downloaded Readability for Chrome just to get through the article.
Reading more than a sentence caused my eyes to sort of glaze over and even when trying to focus I was reading but not grasping. Can't say I've ever had a font do that to me.
In cases like this, you can just "inspect" on the text block, find the rule for the font-family and set whatever font you like, no need for extensions :)
firefox reading mode (i believe it's the same devs as that chrome extension? icbw) is the first button i press on most sites. i couldn't do without it.
Well the Wikipedia article on the subject is very instructive:
"The 9-9-9 format was chosen based on the 'button A' and 'button B' design of pre-payment coin-operated public payphones in wide use (first introduced in 1925) which could be easily modified to allow free use of the 9 digit on the rotary dial in addition to the 0 digit (then used to call the operator)"
So there were valid technical reasons, as well as 999 being harder to dial by accident.
Yes, but here it's hardly reasonable to describe the choice of numbers as "crappy design". It's a rational choice: a number that is easy to remember, and accidental calls don't happen too easily, making the service better available for actual emergencies.
Britain still talks of 999 only, even if 112 works just the same - today, as extremely few phones use decadic dialing any more, a number that would be represented by just four on-hook pulses is no longer any more of a problem from the point of accidentally dialing it.
"What I said originally was that 999 is a bad choice as it takes considerably more time to dial."
You are probably not old enough to know why you use the word "dial" when you refer to pressing keys.
999 looks wrong on any phone and hence elicits a response, 112 looks like yet another extension. The only reason you associate 112 with emergency services is because that is what you have learned from an early age.
I'll assert that 999 is a far better number for an emergency - it does not look anything like any other number that you would want to dial unless you have a real problem.
> You are probably not old enough to know why you use the word "dial" when you refer to pressing keys.
Actually it's the opposite. You sound like one who has never tried to "dial" 999 on a rotary dial when seconds are the difference between life and death. 999 in that moment feels like an awful choice.
We are taking about emergency and as such the most important thing is time and not the rest of the reasons you mentioned.
I would say 999 is still the better choice as it is always the last stop on a rotary. I can imagine if they had it as 111, for example, a lot of people would be redialing from panicking and accidentally dialling too far.
In NZ 111 is the number and worked fine - but then that's because the the exchange switches and dials were set up backwards to the British ones (rumoured to be by mistake!)
> Valid technical reasons and crappy design are not mutually exclusive.
'Valid', in this context, means that they do in fact at least diminish the arguments against the chosen solution. If you want to argue that the specific reasons given by others here do not trump your preferred solution, you should make that specific argument, instead of falling back on generalities, especially when they are not so general.
Interestingly the reason is analogue in nature. With pulse dialing a single pulse for a 1 could happen by accident quite easily (e.g. two lines knocking into each other). 999 can't happen accidentally.
Misdialling short numbers on a rotary phone was easy and common. If your finger slipped out of the dial it would return at that point and dial a shorter (lower) number. The most common point for a finger to slip was at the start of each turn, so if your finger slipped you would mostly dial ones or twos.
You cannot dial a 9 in this way.
The amount of time it took to dial 999 was inconsequential. Nothing was instant in the days when this protocol was invented.
It was the only number that could not be dialled by accident by letting go of the dial too early. The aim wasn't to dial quickly, it was to avoid accidental calls.
Rotary dials in New Zealand were the other way around (sending ten minus the number dialled pulses) so the emergency number there was (and still is) 111 for the same reason: the hardest to dial by accident.
Yes, in e.g. the UK, perhaps, where 1 was two pulses (although they would be more likely to dial 000, I would think) but not in NZ, for the reason given in the comment you replied to.
You're right, it's been a long time since I used a rotary-dial phone (or even a keypad phone that used pulse dialing...) and information like this gets dropped off the stack of 'useful things to know' eventually ;(
>As it happens, the choice of 999 was fortunate for accessibility reasons, compared with e.g. lower numbers, because in the dark or in dense smoke 999 could be dialled by placing a finger one hole away from the dial stop (see the articles on rotary dial and GPO telephones) and rotating the dial to the full extent three times. This enables all users including the visually impaired to easily dial the emergency number. It is also the case that it is relatively easy for 111, and other low-number sequences, to be called accidentally, including when transmission wires making momentary contact produce a pulse similar to dialling (e.g. when overhead cables touch in high winds)
So maybe by fortune only, but it doesn't sound so crappy.
On the other hand, anecdotally (we have had 112 or 113 here for as long as I can remember) I have seen reports on newspapers of people (with movenments limited, like being tied or wounded or however impaired) that managed to "dial" these "low" numbers by just quickly pushing and releasing the hook button with their foot (or nose, etc.).
> "dial" these "low" numbers by just quickly pushing and releasing the hook button
In New Zealand as a kid, we dialed numbers using the hook by subtracting the digits from 10 because the rotary digits were labelled the reverse of other countries. The pay phones there in the 1970's required 3 two-cent coins for a call, but not if you dialed using the hook. In the first season of The Wire, the drug dealers use the same subtract-from-10 system, but it's for their secret code using push-button pay phones.
I'm sure I wont be the first or the last to point out that you are clearly too young to remember pulse dialing with a rotary input device.
The whole point of 999 was that a nine was the only number you could guarantee to accurately dial blind on a rotary input device with only your sense of touch and a little knowledge about the device itself available to you.
I'm also not too sure why any other number would be preferable. 999 really stands out whereas all the other emergency numbers across the world do not. I'll accept that because I'm a Brit that I have been conditioned to 999 being THE emergency number might bias me somewhat but I think my point still stands: 999 is far more obvious than any other emergency number.
I do a lot of (modern ie VoIP) telephony work and can only think that the 9 for an outside line plus rubbish dial plans and crap hardware and programming meant that 999 might not work for some systems. I've also explored the "not British" criteria for the number ... 8)
Can anyone explain why 999 is not the best emergency number ever chosen?
The problem is the amount of time you spend waiting for the dial to return. At the standard rate of ten pulses per second, you would end up waiting nine pulses three times or (0.9 * 3)s plus the pause (approximately 3 pulses wide) for the dial to return, plus however long it took you to finger and wind the dial three times. Could easily take upward of six seconds.
111 (if it could feasibly be allocated) would be the best three-digit code. You would spend the least amount of time rewinding, fingering, and returning. The minimum time per symbol would be 0.1s for the single pulse, ~0.3 seconds for the pause (that section on the dial between the backstop and the 1 digit hole) and about 0.1-0.2s for the finger and wind (reduced due to Fitts's law, and easier for the blind since it is the first hole from the backstop rather than the second). These factors combined could cut the dial time easily in half.
> Can anyone explain why 999 is not the best emergency number ever chosen?
Numbers with widely separated digits such as 911 in the US or 119 in Japan are less likely to be accidentally dialed than numbers with similar or identical digits such as 999 or 112. As the article notes:
"However, around 35 per cent of calls do not involve actual requests for help, with the majority of these made by children playing with home phones or people accidentally dialling 999 or the European emergency number 112, often from a mobile handset in a pocket or handbag."
Though phones which map the emergency number to speed dial may negate the advantage.
Accidental calls waste time and potentially divert resources from real emergencies.
I work on VoIP systems and 999 is set up on these as a priority dial (built into the system as "emergency number"), giving it's route out to whichever ARS is available. I cannot see this limited by the "9 for an outside line" as it bypasses these constraints, along with having to login to a phone to use 999.
If you look at images of rotary phone dials I think you will see that it is 0 and 1 that can be dialed easily without vision. Only in New Zealand can 9 be dialed so easily (they use a different dial, however unbelievably).
I used to use the bloody things (I'm 47) - I suspect your research is based on pictures and supposition.
At rest the rotary dial was at say null. As soon as you moved it over a number and then released it, that was the number that was dialled. 0 and 1 were first (obvs). When you hit the backstop (a small metal shim) then you had hit nine. It isn't as bad an interface as it might sound. You would get feedback via a series of clicks as the dial returned to null and also via force (springs etc).
There really was a good reason for picking 999 originally and the world has moved on since but I still assert that 999 is a far better number (or nowadays: a symbol) for invoking an emergency call than any other number.
That's a really strange phone you're describing. Did it have a single hole on the dial? Where are you from?
I too used rotary phones - I'm 28 (if it makes a difference) and I grew up in a former Soviet republic. The phone had a dial with 10 holes in it: 1-9 followed by 0 (just like on a modern phone keypad, by the way). You stick your finger in a hole over the digit and rotate clockwise until the the stop. Then, take the finger out and wait for it to rotate back to the original position. Then you dial the next digit.
Just FYI, Hacker News seems to be flagging most of your comments and making them invisible or "dead". I was browsing with showdead on and was able to "vouch" for your comment and raise it from the dead.
I'm not sure what to tell you to do to fix this problem, but I thought you might want to know. I think the site tries to trick you into thinking everyone can see your comments when they're actually made dead. So you might never know.
That's really interesting! With North American rotary phones, you put your finger into the hole that corresponds to the number you want to dial, turn til you hit the backstop then release. There was no null position.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, which is entirely possible.
Do you have a picture of this style of rotary phone? I've only ever seen or used the kind ficklepickle described (and that's all I can find pictures of online).
I remember the emergency number being 90000 back when rotary dials were common. It's harder to misdial that 999, because you want as separated numbers as possible, and it's faster to dial because only the first 9 takes time, and then you zip through a bunch of zeroes at the end.
Most rotary phone systems had 1=1 pulse, 2=2 pulses and so on, with 0=10 pulses. In that system, 0 would take even longer to dial than 9. New Zealand apparently went with 1=9 pulses, but still kept 0=10 pulses. Was there somewhere that had 0=1 pulse?
> The Australian letter-to-number mapping was A=1, B=2, F=3, J=4, L=5, M=6, U=7, W=8, X=9, Y=0
wat?
> In the United Kingdom the letter "O" was combined with the digit "0" rather than "6".
nooo...
> In Norway, the North American system with the number '1' corresponding to one pulse was used, except for the capital, Oslo, which used the same "inverse" system as in New Zealand.
holy crap
> the United Kingdom selected 999 due to the ease of converting call office dials to make free calls. "0" for the Operator was already free, and the cam that removed the shunt on the line when the dial was rotated to the "0" position could be altered to include the adjacent digit "9" (and "8" if required) so that calls to "0" and "999" could be made without inserting coins.
And there we have the explanation for GPs assertation that "999" was the best number, it was instead a purely technical limitation in the mechanical construction of pay phones.
I've just read a few other comments here and it seems that I might be a little older than most of the HN commentards, these days.
When I was a lad you put your finger into the bottom left hole of a rotary dial and moved the dial clockwise until it was over the chosen number. You then released your finger and allowed the dial to roll back to null. You then dialled the next number etc
You did not press keys. That is why 999 was chosen. Telephones with rotary dials had obvious clues to where the home "hole" was - where you would dial from - and you would hit the backstop when you hit nine when you rotated the dial.
I was told it was selected because it can be dialed in the dark - just go all the way way with the rotor three times. I've always found that 999 sounds like an emergency, the biggest number. 112 seems absolutely arbitrary to me.
