Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: David Lemson Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Which Came First? Message-ID: <12836@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 30 Sep 90 20:01:35 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 59 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 699, Message 2 of 10 In a message of Fri, 28 Sep 90 , John Parsons writes: >How are the number pads arranged on European or Asian phones? The ones I've seen have been just like ours, but I haven't seen Eastern Europe, etc. In the older areas (and many countries), you're more likely to see rotary dial phones. Some countries don't handle Touch-Tone (tm), so the only pushbutton phones you see are actually pulse. The country I'm thinking about here is Israel, but this situation is changing (slowly). >The last time I was in a telco building (1975), dir assisters >looked in paper directories and test boards had rotary dials. Do the >keyboards of today's operator consoles have the same number pads as >us mortals (7 8 9 on the top), or do they have 1 2 3 on the top row, >as on phones? The only telco building I've seen recently was this year in an AT&T Office in Washington, D.C. that handled operator assistance for NPAs 202 and 703. The setup they had there was the newest equipment AT&T has, according the guy that showed us around. There was no large board with lighted buttons, the equipment consisted of a large (approx 100 key) keyboard, paper white monochrome screen, and earpiece/ microphone. When a call came in, the operator would see the person's number and the number they were trying to reach (if they dialed 0+NPA+NXX+XXXX). If it was a collect call, the operator typed in the caller's name, and hit one button as the call was placed by the computer. The operator asked if they would accept the charges, and one more button connected the two. Also, on the keyboards, they could make it so that the caller could not hear the callee, the caller could hear but not talk to the callee, or make it a full connection. Many of the calls involved one keypress to connect, five to ten seconds of talking to the caller, and one keypress to disconnect from the operator. The operators seemed to like this setup better than the old boards with so much work. However, this also seems to make the setup a little more Big Brotherish, as the AT&T corporate people can instantly see how productive any certain operator is. In this room with the operators, they had several large LED message annunciators that put up messages like "Good job Jeannie!" I suppose the negative messages were saved for review time with the supervisors. In response to your question, in this setup, if the operator has to enter a number, it gets entered just as you might enter it on your computer's number keypad, with the 789 across the top. Incidentally, in that same building, they had the last cord-board setup still in use by AT&T. It's the national TTY (service for the deaf) directory assistance center. Each operator has a cord board with several incoming and outgoing lines, a PC, and a Baudot modem. The accounting for these calls is all done by hand -- they figure that the operator has so much time available waiting for slow typists that they can fill out cards for each call. And in this setup, when a typical caller asked for the relay station in Wherever, Pennsylvania, the operator got out the phone book and looked it up. (No computerized DA here!)