TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: What About Areas Where Alphabet is Not Like Ours?

Re: What About Areas Where Alphabet is Not Like Ours?

Mr Joseph Singer (joeofseattle@yahoo.com)
Fri, 9 Feb 2007 17:17:28 PST

Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:16:47 -0500
wrote:

> It's my understanding that the addition of letters on the dial is
> mostly an American thing, and European phones don't generally have
> them at all. I expect this is similar in most of the countries you
> mention, although I found a web page that mentioned that Russian
> phones used to have cyrillic letters on them, but they don't any
> more.

Nope. Letters in the dial was not just an American thing. British
dials had letters associated with numbers as well. (The exchange in
London GROsvenor [470] or the exchange in Edinburgh, Scotland of
CALedonian [225] or the number in Paris, France OPEra [473] as
examples.) The letter/number association was a little different than
that used in North American dials. 6 was MN (no O) with O sharing the
position with 0. Also København (Copenhagen, Denmark) has some
letters from the Danish alphabet on it as well. Paris, France also
had number/letter combinations on early dials.

As far as letters on dials the ITU agreed that new dials/keypads would
have ABC/2, DEF/3, GHI/4, JKL/5, MNO/6, PQRS/7, TUV/8 and WXYZ/9 with 1
and 0 having no letters associated with them.

In North America Northern Telecom/Nortel hasn't put "Operator" on the 0
key for many years.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Once again, the 8-bit characters did
not render correctly in this message. PAT]

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