Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Thu, 16 May 1991 15:09:42 PDT From: Robert_Swenson.OSBU_North@xerox.com Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Old Phone Numbers Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 366, Message 8 of 11 Lines: 42 Talking about old phone numbers; party line phones, etc., when I was growing up in Berkeley, Calif, before and during WWII my home phone was Berkeley 1199-W. The phone of a house across the street was Berkeley 1199-J. Some frends of ours in Albany, the next city to the north, had Berkeley 1199. The Berkeley exchanges (Berkeley, Thornwall, Ashburry) were manual until quite late in time - about 1946 when they were converted to dial. They were almost the last area to go dial in the San Francisco area, always excluding the famous exchange in San Francisco, China. The operators in China knew each resident of Chinatown by name, calls could be placed within the exchange by name, and the operators could frequently track someone down if he/she was away from home. All gone now. During WWII the Berkeley area manual exchanges became very overloaded. New phone connections were almost impossible to get, but they could be gotten in extreme cases. All phone numbers were four digit except that during the war, some numbers in Ashburry were five digit. The young woman who became my wife had a five digit phone number. Exchange names: Berkeley became BErkeley became BErkeley-7 became BE7 became 237. (Our friends in Albany had been moved to LAndscape-5 with the same four digits.) Along the way our part of town became LAndscape-6 which became LA6 which became 526 except for pay phones which became CEdar-7. Note this is the same numbers as BErkeley-7 (237). Bob Swenson [Moderator's Note: Ah yes, speaking of China, have you ever seen the famous photograph which AT&T used in their centennial history book a few years ago? It was full of fascinating old photographs, but my favorite was the one entitled 'San Fransisco, China Exchange'. From right after the start of this century, it showed an old-fashioned switchboard with a Chinese woman operator, and a young girl playing on the floor next to her. PAT]