Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1991 05:30:41 GMT From: William Vajk Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Why Are *Telephone Keypads* Built Upside Down Reply-To: William Vajk 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 446, Message 1 of 7 Lines: 56 In article Jeremy Grodberg writes: > The real question is why are *Adding Machine* keypads built upside > down? Since we read left-to-right and top-to-bottom, and count > low-to-high, the telephone keypad would be the obvious choice for > layout. Blaise Pascal built his wheeled adding machine in 1642. Perhaps an early model for the rotary dial :-) It is my understanding that the earliest push button adding machines were created circa 1850. In the case of the adding machine, 0 really is a placeholder at the beginning of the decade and is next to the number 1 for any given decade. The direction taken by the layout, bottom 0 to top 9 d oubtless had to do simplification of the mechanical design. Of course there might be some holdover from the abacus in the design, as beads are moved up to change state, eg to add. Bottom up calculation was in. And even now, standard office practice is to work the pile of paper from the bottom (the oldest) upwards. We read, in the west, top to bottom, left to right. But we don't do everything that way, and we don't always think or plan in that direction either. In the phone system as we know it today, the 0 is really a 10. In terms of rotary (pulse) dialing, ten interruptions to the circuit are sent for the digit 0. And of course we have 11 and 12 with touchtone phones as well, though they're disguised as * and #. Note the disabling of call waiting is *70 on touch tone, or 1170 on rotary dialers. Given the transition from pulse to tone dialing, it wasn't really necessary to retain the concept that 0 is 10. In fact, numerical correlations to make connections are now unnecessary. We have a computer select the lines to connect. We no longer have a series of mechanical steppers physically moving things about, which land at particular grid locations, and there make the desired connection. I see more and more sources for programmable autodialers. Many of us tend to call mostly some finite list of people. We're creatures of habit. We don't usually number these people, although with the rapid-dial services offered by some telecos it does happen that way too. But when we buy an autodialer, each colleague, associate, or friend ends up owning one of the buttons on the autodialer. In a the sea of numbers we call civilization, we can get rid of another d*mn (long live Bill Blue) number and get back to dealing with people without being required to use a number to get to them. I really like having to deal with only a single hieroglyph in order to etablish contact, instead of all those numbers. Now that we don't have to learn and remember all those numbers, I wonder what folks are going to be doing with all that freed up brain space. Bill Vajk