KLondike 5
In the old mechanical telephone wire centers a 555 prefix could be used for number of functions...none would get you a line out of there, though. The only one I remember was "555-1212". If you dialed that number and hung up, you'd get a "ring-back"...so a repairman could easily check if the phone set's bell was getting connection.
Once the old mechanical main frames were replaced with the electronic switching systems (ESS) none of those old cool tricks worked anymore.
BTW - Rockford's number was 555-2368 I believe.
KLondike 5
555
Whenever a phone number is stated on a TV show, it is always 555-something, as it is always a non working number.
First number was 39R3, old wall crank phone with a good magneto that I played with later, that phone was upgraded several times before we had a dial system and that too hung on the wall. At Lonerock there was no phone service until the late 70's. The ranchers in the area used the old crank phones and bare galvanized wire to connect the ranches together, no operator. The crank was used with a simple code to let all know who should answer the phone. The ranchers maintained the system and kept the wires up most of the time, still some of the remains are in place. Batteries were used to to power the system, the crank only powered the ringers.
jud
555-1212
555-1212, when preceded with an area code, was the number for long distance directory assistance.
Another oldtimer here
The first phone I remember was a crank phone. I have no idea what the number actually was, but, we listened for something like two longs and three shorts. That meant the person calling for us had made to longish cranks followed by three shortish cranks with a small gap between each crank. Of course, it was a party line. To get long distance you called CENTRAL, the local telephone office. The nice lady there would go through some process to connect the local system to a major carrier. The major carrier would then call whatever local system necessary to have them, in turn, make the call to the party you hoped to reach. It took quite a while to discover if you were actually going to get to talk to the party you hoped to reach.
Our first dial phone simply had the prefix 754. No name. All the nearby Bell System phones, however, were something like CIrcle, GArfield and HEmlock.
Our number was 861J. It was a party line. We had an old Western Electric desk phone with no dial.
You picked up the receiver and waited for the operator to say, "Number, please." Just like Ernestine ("One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies…"). By the time we got a dial phone, the alpha exchange was a thing of the past. Our exchange was 472.
> Our number was 861J. It was a party line. We had an old Western Electric desk phone with no dial.
> You picked up the receiver and waited for the operator to say, "Number, please."
Our number was 4215J, also a party line.
We moved to different city, in the middle 1950's and had a DIamond4-xxxx number, which had evolved to a 344-xxxx number by the early 1960's.
The 861 or 4215 or whatever was the actual line number assigned in the rack to the wires that fed your particular neighborhood.
The letter W, J, R, or M (chosen to be phonetically distinct) indicated the electrical signal that rang your bell on the party line. Everybody's phone on the line got the ringing signal but your phone was wired to ignore all but one of them. There were 4 signals, a positive or negative bias with respect to ground on one or the other of the pair of wires, applied during the AC that rang the bell. (Single-party phones don't use a ground connection.) Ernestine plugged a cord into the jack number 861 and pushed the W button to send the ring signal.
Since they only had 4 distinct electrical ringing combinations, our 8-party line still used 1 or 2 rings. Ernestine must have had a 1 or 2 switch also. We still had that system, automated for a while with dial, before they ran buried cable around the county and cut us back to 2 or 4-party lines.
Some other telephone manufacturers (and there were a few supplying overseas and small independent operating companies) used a different ringing system. One I know used different AC frequencies to ring different bells on the line. It wasn't foolproof - you could hear a weak ring sometimes on your phone when it was for your neighbor, and I don't think it was as reliable as the Western Electric/Bell ringing scheme.
