The Past Several Decades of Telephone History
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Depending on the amount of time that you have been using the telephone, you might be fascinated to learn a little bit of history about it. I'm not necessarily talking about going all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell but I am referring to the fact that the telephone has really changed quite a bit in recent history.
It wasn't all that long ago whenever a human operator sat at a large switchboard and manually connected different phone calls that were taking place. By plugging in a wire to wherever the phone call was being routed to, they have the power to connect and disconnect at will, the phone calls that were under their control. It was not very long, however, until the phone company began to see the need to automate the system a little bit further.
This is when the 10 digit telephone number came into existence and it was a huge step forward over the old system of talking to a manual operator. By being able to identify where the call was coming from and where it was going to, using this numerical system, the entire process was able to be automated.
The first three digits that you use whenever you are dialing a telephone number are routed to various areas of the country. Whenever the 10 digit system first came into place, these three digit numbers were assigned to specific areas, and therefore became known as area codes. At the time whenever they were first used, they seem to be in limitless supply but now they are being used up rather quickly.
The second three digits in the telephone number are more of a localized number which can help you to break down where a telephone call is coming from or going to. Inside each area code, the possibility of 999 different numerical combinations allowed for a wide diversity and a narrow coverage for each of those numbers.
It wasn't all that long ago whenever we didn't use pushbutton telephones, and everybody had a rotary dial phone. Although these went out of service a couple of decades ago, most of the telephone systems to allow you to use a rotary system, even today. It was a large dial with numbers and you would spin the dial and allow it to spin back, the noise of the spinning letting the phone company know which number it was that you dialed.
We have moved quite a bit away from the house phone now and many of us are exclusively using cellular telephones in order to place all of our calls. The fax machine is also becoming increasingly popular and as a result, more and more area codes are being used up regularly. Even though it wasn't all that many years ago that we didn't carry cell phones around, most of us could not imagine that day ever coming again.
It is difficult to tell what the future is going to hold for us as far as the telephone and technology are concerned. For at least the foreseeable future, however, we will be using the 10 digit number and the area code in order to place our calls.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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