when i said about calling from other countries, my bad i meant more like using a phone from another country in sweden, conversion would have been dealt with when calling into sweden, but! apparently there was a solution to using a phone from outside of the country, basically stickers with the swedish number on em that you plonk on the rotary dial to cover up the other numbers.
The model you have here from Sweden is called "Dialog" and probably from the 1970s. At that time it was illegal to own your phone and all phones were rented from the state owned monopoly phone service called "Televerket". It was illegal to connect a foreign phone to the network. In the 80s some cordless models from the US was sold in Sweden by mail order but with the warning text that it was illegal to use them on the network. In the 1990s the rules relaxed and now you can use whatever you want.
@@teknohead500 It was the same in the US until 1983, right down to the "grey market" phones - you had to rent your phone from the monopoly carrier. I swear I remember something about my grampa continuing to rent his dial phone into the 2000s "just because" 🤷♀️
When I first saw your videos I thought this guy is crazy, barely knew anything, and you was trying your best to learn, oh and you was crazy. I had to subscribe because I appreciate you were young and making a great effort to learn and understand, and of course you are crazy. With every video you have made you have become more knowledgeable and even now you have started to really demonstrate how things work. You have a great future as a RUclips educator if you keep this up, and I like this. Stay crazy Sam.
We even had to rent our answering machines in Sweden. When I moved from Stockholm to New York City in 1985 I just left the answering machine on playing a loop of Rapsody in Blue and it took months for the state phone company to kill it.
Back in the day you were not allowed to. You were not allowed to connect anything to the phone network. The phone was not yours, it was the property of the phone-company, so basically you were only renting them when you got phone service in Sweden.
So in Germany the emergency call numbers are 110 and 112- and rotary phones in semi-public spaces (like schools, Libraries or sometimes restaurants) or sometimes payphones in bars had a tiny padlock on the dial that would restrain the movement so you could only dial up to 2- that way you would still be able to use it for an emergency call
So you only could dial 112 but not 110 on the German FeTAp, since allowing the 0 would enable ALL digits. In that regard, the swedish phone is better. Although their emergency number is also 112.
in the UK the emergency call number is 999, so the lines blowing in the wind could not trigger a false call. it would be very hard to get 27 well timed pulses from the wind.
@@creamwobbly 111 was rejected because it could be triggered by faulty equipment or lines rubbing together. 999 chosen as it could be made to call free on A and B button payphones. 112 was introduced to the UK in 1993. so my 999 comment was part right.
It is interesting watching this channel’s short go from music to old telephone technology. I always knew synths were just a fun gateway drug to electrical engineering.
there were differences between "oslo norm" and other parts of norway, later phones had a switch inside to change over from "oslonorm" to "standard", an older colleague had a bit of fun when working in the phone company in the 90s when he reconfigured a phone to "oslonorm" before a school class were schedueled to visit, the plan was to call one from one phone and over to the other phone, in a different room, but when he dialed the number he ended up in a office switchboard at another phone office.
Oooh, nostalgia... 035 is the area code for Halmstad (in Halland, South Sweden) btw, home town of Roxette's Per Gessle. =) When I grew up, you couldn't even BUY one of those phones, you just got them on loan or lease from the national phone corporation Televerket!
Yeah, in Finland, we had local phone cooperatives or phone nonprofits (depending on where you where - the greater Helsinki area had a nonprofit, and I think Turku had a cooperative company), from which we, as members, leased the phones. This all went downhill quickly when the boards of those coops and orgs were filled with business minded rightwingers in late 1990s and the organizations' and coops' assets were entered into new larger limited companies. The members would get shares in the new companies, which the leadership would offer to buy - quite cheaply - and end up making a lot of money. The price of the calls went up and the quality of the service went down, which obviously always happens when you insert somebody wanting to make a profit in the mix.
Thanks for the shout out for NZ! :) Ours started with 9, so the zero was 10 pulses. I used to have to 'reverse-count' the number while tapping it out in a phone box for free calls back when I was a lad (pre-internet & pre-cellphones)
That was one reason I was given by a retired Post Office telephone exchange engineer. They reversed the numbers to make tap dialling more difficult. However, where I lived most numbers started with eight, so that kind of back fired. And I found out that only the first three digits needed to be tapped in a pay-phone. You could just dial the rest.
@@xanataph I heard that the reason us Kiwis dial 111 instead of 999 in an emergency is because the government got a "super" deal on a shipload of backwards phones some other country rejected! The story came up during an interview on National Radio.🤔
@@tomobedlam297 Actually some Telex techs back in the day said something to me to that effect. It just seemed like a too much of a short sighted decision to really believe. Interestingly though, the Telex network had it's dials the more conventional way around. I presume in either case of 111 or 999, it's so it takes nine pulses to dial each digit,. If you just needed a sequence of three single pulses, that would be too easy to accidentally dial by hook-flashing, although it would be faster.
You should hear one of the old mechanical bell phones when given twice the normal ring signal voltage. Don't recall why, just that it could be done from a test panel in the room where the switchboard wires were joined with the wires going out to the users. Columns of screw terminal pairs for the numbers in the station, and flat panels wire screw terminal pairs attached to the outgoing wires. If a subscriber moved, and the number should go to a new address, the wire connection between the number and outgoing line had to be changed. Possibly,vespecially if there hasn't been a previous subscriber at the new adress, a field tech had to do some connections in one or more little cabinets along the route between the station and the subscriber. In addition to the sound of a rotary phone, loved the sound of the racks of electromechanical 500-selectors in the station. Remember walking between them with a list of numbers who hadn't paid their bill, sticking little plastic pegs between contact elements, either to block only outgoing calls, or both directions... Not the same thing sitting in front of a screen typing commands for the same thing for the computerised (AXE) part of the station. (different number series were converted at different times)
The reason for using the number 90 000 is that you could dial a 9 end then keep dialing a number of zeros. As long as you dialed at least four zeros you got connected. It was easy to do even in stressful situations.
If you want one more I have one, same model and same color. Calling to Sweden didn’t require any extra actions. The switchers sorted that. But you couldn’t use a phone from the UK in Sweden.
From memory, the emergency phone number in New Zealand was setup as 111 instead of 999 like in Look Mum no computer land because the NZ govt bought a UK emergency call system except phone dials in NZ went the other way round and they couldn’t change the call system so 999 became 111. I also think that the reason it was a full dial for each number in an emergency was that it made it easier for those with visual impairments but I can’t remember why exactly.
New Zealander here -- can confirm that our dials were numbered 0 to 9 clockwise. Not sure why, one explanation I heard was that it was done to get around a patent, but I have no idea if that's true. And yes, our emergency number is 111, although I think 999 and 911 also work nowadays. I think the near-full-rotation digits were chosen to minimise the chance of dialling it accidentally, but that's just a guess. Another thing I vaguely seem to remember hearing once was that our dials used to be numbered like the British ones, but at some point they were all changed! But that seems very unlikely to me, as it would have caused a huge amount of disruption
A total guess but the visual impairment thing might be because a 1 looks the least alike compared to other numbers. It's just a vertical line, no curves to confuse.
999... Before a dedicated emergency number you would use 0 to call the operator. Since operators were sometimes busy, emergency calls were made to wait. The British General Post Office decided to implement a dialed system. 111 was not used since it was often triggered by equipment and wiring faults. An intermittent short would dial 1. 222 was not used sine that was an existing exchange code. Anything starting with 0 would go to the operator. 999 was the next easiest number to find. 3 digits all the same means you don't need to remove your finger, but 911 dials faster.
That's interesting. The UK emergency number is 999 because the idea was if you were incapacitated, say lying on the floor but could get to the phone, you could stick two fingers into the 9 and 0 and just rock the dial back and forth to dial the number.
i actually have an og wall socket for that jack for when i install my ericofon (a swedish one). i live in north america. it came out of a swedish house. it sounds more sketchy than it really is - my swedish tutor was going back to visit because his family was selling a house, and he just brought one of them back for me including the cover plate. the only reason why i went the whole nine yards was that i didn’t want to chop off and rewire the end 🥴
Now we use the small 4-pin "RJ” style connector (which also fits into an RJ45, Ethernet, socket, (also used for the cord between the handset and main body of the phone) - allowing for selecting what service, phone/Ethernet, goes to what outlet in say an office, by switching wires around on a patch panel.
Talking about counting pulses just reminds me of a brief period when my phone's dial pad crapped out, so I flipped it over to "pulse" mode and sat there tapping the switch hook to dial out XD. It was not fun, but it _is_ absolutely possible to do if you can keep time, you're 11 and have no money to buy a new one, and you don't mind accidentally calling the wrong people a few times, first (because you're 11 and you don't give a shit about random strangers lmfao)
My dad knew a guy who won a bet with a telephone engineer by doing that. The engineer installed one of those special phones with a blanking plate over the dial, and bet the guy that he couldn't dial out on it. Guy promptly hammered on the switch hook and called his aunt in Australia!
Just helped my elderly aunt install her modern phone before christmas. She was using one of those grey ones until last year. She could still receive calls, but had some trouble dialing.
If not an issue with her age, it could be because a worn spring causing the speed/frequency of the pulse train of the numbers to be off... Remember the test panel in the phone station having one of those vibratory frequency meters (using tuned leafs) and we'd ask the customer to dial 9s while observing the meter when troubleshooting calling issues... (after physically patching the customers line into the panel)
my mate's dad was a telecom engineer back in the day, yellow maestro van and everything. I was amazed one drunk evening when he picked up the receiver of his rotary dial phone and held a "clicker box" to the mouthpiece. the tones it made dialled the local chinese takeaway for our order. no fingering required. awesome.
This is crazy, but it’s so much nostalgia for me. This particular phone you have on the video is from my hometown! As you can see, the phone number starts with 035 which is the city code for the town Halmstad! We had them in schools and etc. it was a common model to buy for many city/government institutions. Where in the world is this phone now?
Once upon a time I had to write firmware for phone equipment. So part of the per country settings was which rule to use for translating digits into pulses. If I remember correctly, there were 3 different variants. New Zealand and Oslo used the third system with 10 pulses for 0. 9 pulses for 1. 8 pulses for 2 etc. There were also a bit of difference for different countries what the pulse length/pause should be and the allowed min/max pause between digits.
@@calysagora3615 Are you commenting of actual historic knowledge, or commenting based on "I believe"? Note that Norway no longer supports decadic dialing, as specified by the current ETSI standard which means that any older differences between Oslo and the rest of the country on impulse counts are no longer relevant. As of the current standard, dialing in Norway must use DTMF.
I actually did that once when I first figured out how pulse dialing worked. Parents made me stop doing it because the pulse dialing would ring all the touch-tone phones in the house. 😅
Man i loved these phones when you could just slam it down ending the call in style 😂hearing that ringing sound thinking you broke it than puting it to your ear cheking if it's still working.
That is so interesting. I love coming across random vids like this. Now, I am very bored and have been minimally day drinking, but I know I'm not the only one that thinks this is neat. I love rotary phones anyway. They are so effing cool.
I'm swedish and my grandmother has 3 if these at her house, 1 in the workshop, 1 in the living room and 1 in the kitchen, she has a samsung flip phone but keeps the others as they make her remember her dead husband who put them up in the first place (aka my grandfather)
I’m 27 and when I was a kid I used to get looked after by this elderly lady. She’s let me dial on her rotary phone for her when she needed to make a call. Good times.
We had a phone like that when I was a kid. With the numbers offset by one because even though Finland imported Swedish phones, we did have the numbers in their normal places.
Vienna changed in the 1950s the rotary disc in 3 months from 0-1 and letters to 1-0. The old numbers had a letter first, the new telephone book was with numbers only.
I learned how to make calls on a rotary phone in the early 90s. My grandparents had one. Also, I was the kind of kid who would watch a commercial, see something cool, then be bummed I couldn't order it because we didn't have a 'touch-tone phone'.
The funky connector is actually genius, it means you can connect loads of devices to one plug, without overloading the system, because the device in use would simply disconnect all subsequent devices. Zero comes last in other countries? That's like Americans having the first day of the week during the week END. You crazy people!
I hooked a rotary dial up to an LED yesterday to watch it flashing and count the blinks; that's how I found out that the pulse rate is faster than my persistence of vision. I could only see half the pulses with the naked eye! I had to film the LED in slow motion to make sure the dial was working right.
My grandma has those at her house, though they have more modern connector things and they’re a pretty green. The sound they make are soooo loud so when we visit she turns them off. :))
My two tone mustard & brown wall mount rotary phone is extremely !!!loud when it rings, & also the emergency number here in Australia is 000 which is the furthest number away on the dial which doesn’t exactly speed up the process .
International dialling... Oh what fun! I know in the UK international exchanges they had whole floors dedicated to interfacing different country's systems. Now I know why!
That swedish phone looks exactly like the phone we had in our summer-cottage before grandma became too cool for such old phones and learned how to use a cell phone properly🧐 (Plus it would be unused all time except four calls a year.😅🤫) so I think that we either sold it or threw it away. I live in Sweden. Oh, and having the “0”first makes sense since all the area codes would (and still) start with that, for example Gothenburg is “031”. Edit: this phone is from Halmstad/ the county of Halland since it starts with “035”
I remember in the late 90s when I was in my later teenage years,, we had cordless phones ever since I was about 10 but my mother got fed-up got rid of all the cordless and went back to old-school rotary to try to tame my teenage Ways,,, I bought a cordless and kept it in my room lol
I'm 20 years old and I recently bought a landline that works over Internet I had an old telephone that used Pulse Instead of touch tone I had to buy a converter Which was extremely expensive
No, it's becasue our emergency nr were 90 000 before we changed it to 112 in Sweden so it was like that to be able to dial it fast. It was a bummer do to dial the right amount of zeros
I remember when rotary phones was still common, some people who made a lot of calls in their work would just keep the finger in the hole that's furthest from the stopper (I think it was 0 here) and just dial every number by moving the correct distance by muscle memory. Looked pretty bad ass. I think you could speed it up a little bit by helping the dial along to send the pulses slightly faster. But if you did it too fast it would fail.
New Zealand rotary dials still have the "0" in the ten pulse position. But the 1-9 digits are reversed. So 9 is one pulse and 1 is nine pulses, which is different again to Sweden's dial arrangement. However, the Telex system here used the more conventional & sensible arrangement of 1 is one pulse etc.
When I was much younger, the pub I frequented had a phone on the counter for wives to call the bar and find their husbands. But this phone had no dial for calling out. It was for incoming calls only. But if you knew the secret of pulse dialing, you could tap the hook button and make it dial out by tapping out the desired phone number.
Telephone sets talk to the phone switch, not other phones. Thus, the Swedish phones received pulses and translating the pulse patterns into standard codes when talking to other switches. It probably gets humorously complicated when making local calls in a fashion that only appeals to ex-AT&T employees or contractors, or Nortel ones.
Yes indeed I was referring to using an international phone in Sweden which was illegal but people still did it. There is international exchange transfera
I remember when I was at Disney Land in the 70’s, and a display had a push button phone and I thought it was SOOOOO cool! But even after we later got a push button phone, it still made the clicking sound after each number.
Because the method for signalling the station what number to connect to was still pulses. The buttons just told the phone how many times to pulse a relay, which would make clicky noises. Later changed to tone signalling, each button made the phone send a mix of two tones, one for row and one for column for the numbers place in the standard matrix (even if it was a funky phone with the buttons in some other layout, such as a circle)
I was today years old when I learned how a rotary phone dialed the numbers...🤦♀️ I mean like I knew how to use one but I didn't know that the sound you were hearing was electrical pulses.. or that that literally translated to the number you were calling
Love the electrical 🔌! All the cool kids always dialed their phones using a pencil or pen to stick in the hole because your fingers got pinched or were too fat, though.
Thats a reason for the zero first. Swedish phone grid has area codes that starts with a zero, so you have to dial a zero first to call everywhere other than local. So it´s logical to have the zero first, makes you dial faster.
You don't need to add 1 to each number. Your UK phone plugged into a uk socket connects to a UK exchange. The number is translated inside the telecoms network.
Here in New Zealand the emergency number is 111 and I believe it was 000 The same as Australia when we used the phones like that So made it faster to dial than the 911 or what ever number
This is what happens when you give the same job to 2 engineers. You'll end up with at least 3 different solutions to the same problem, and they''ll all be incompatible with each other. 🤣
You underestimate the ability of engineers, if you don't think one is enough to create a great quagmire of incompatible solutions to the same problem for no reason. // Engineering student
@@TheGlassgubben I think that's true if the engineer actually cares about what they do. Most of the ones I've met (outside the military anyway) seem to be more interested in what coffee is in the break room. Even so, I'd love to know who thought it was sufficiently horrifying to put a 0 after a 9 that they changed a whole country's phone network to "fix" it...
@@McTroyd Coffee's important in the break room though we engineers are more concerned with having a proper chair to sit in while we solve everyone elses problems.
when i said about calling from other countries, my bad i meant more like using a phone from another country in sweden, conversion would have been dealt with when calling into sweden, but! apparently there was a solution to using a phone from outside of the country, basically stickers with the swedish number on em that you plonk on the rotary dial to cover up the other numbers.
The model you have here from Sweden is called "Dialog" and probably from the 1970s. At that time it was illegal to own your phone and all phones were rented from the state owned monopoly phone service called "Televerket". It was illegal to connect a foreign phone to the network. In the 80s some cordless models from the US was sold in Sweden by mail order but with the warning text that it was illegal to use them on the network. In the 1990s the rules relaxed and now you can use whatever you want.
@@teknohead500 It was the same in the US until 1983, right down to the "grey market" phones - you had to rent your phone from the monopoly carrier. I swear I remember something about my grampa continuing to rent his dial phone into the 2000s "just because" 🤷♀️
When I first saw your videos I thought this guy is crazy, barely knew anything, and you was trying your best to learn, oh and you was crazy. I had to subscribe because I appreciate you were young and making a great effort to learn and understand, and of course you are crazy. With every video you have made you have become more knowledgeable and even now you have started to really demonstrate how things work. You have a great future as a RUclips educator if you keep this up, and I like this. Stay crazy Sam.
We even had to rent our answering machines in Sweden. When I moved from Stockholm to New York City in 1985 I just left the answering machine on playing a loop of Rapsody in Blue and it took months for the state phone company to kill it.
Back in the day you were not allowed to. You were not allowed to connect anything to the phone network. The phone was not yours, it was the property of the phone-company, so basically you were only renting them when you got phone service in Sweden.
So in Germany the emergency call numbers are 110 and 112- and rotary phones in semi-public spaces (like schools, Libraries or sometimes restaurants) or sometimes payphones in bars had a tiny padlock on the dial that would restrain the movement so you could only dial up to 2- that way you would still be able to use it for an emergency call
So you only could dial 112 but not 110 on the German FeTAp, since allowing the 0 would enable ALL digits. In that regard, the swedish phone is better. Although their emergency number is also 112.
Well, back when we still used rotary phones, the emergency number was 90000.
@@DJChol tap tap tap tap pause tap tap pause tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap pause tap tap pause oh shit I took too long between taps. Start again.
in the UK the emergency call number is 999, so the lines blowing in the wind could not trigger a false call. it would be very hard to get 27 well timed pulses from the wind.
@@creamwobbly 111 was rejected because it could be triggered by faulty equipment or lines rubbing together. 999 chosen as it could be made to call free on A and B button payphones. 112 was introduced to the UK in 1993. so my 999 comment was part right.
It is interesting watching this channel’s short go from music to old telephone technology. I always knew synths were just a fun gateway drug to electrical engineering.
there were differences between "oslo norm" and other parts of norway, later phones had a switch inside to change over from "oslonorm" to "standard", an older colleague had a bit of fun when working in the phone company in the 90s when he reconfigured a phone to "oslonorm" before a school class were schedueled to visit, the plan was to call one from one phone and over to the other phone, in a different room, but when he dialed the number he ended up in a office switchboard at another phone office.
Takker
Oooh, nostalgia... 035 is the area code for Halmstad (in Halland, South Sweden) btw, home town of Roxette's Per Gessle. =) When I grew up, you couldn't even BUY one of those phones, you just got them on loan or lease from the national phone corporation Televerket!
Yeah, in Finland, we had local phone cooperatives or phone nonprofits (depending on where you where - the greater Helsinki area had a nonprofit, and I think Turku had a cooperative company), from which we, as members, leased the phones. This all went downhill quickly when the boards of those coops and orgs were filled with business minded rightwingers in late 1990s and the organizations' and coops' assets were entered into new larger limited companies. The members would get shares in the new companies, which the leadership would offer to buy - quite cheaply - and end up making a lot of money. The price of the calls went up and the quality of the service went down, which obviously always happens when you insert somebody wanting to make a profit in the mix.
@@jannepeltonen2036 I've been to Turku.
I miss these. My grandparents had one and I loved it. Eventually, they moved on and it became my play thing. Those sounds are so soothing to me.
Thanks for the shout out for NZ! :) Ours started with 9, so the zero was 10 pulses. I used to have to 'reverse-count' the number while tapping it out in a phone box for free calls back when I was a lad (pre-internet & pre-cellphones)
That was one reason I was given by a retired Post Office telephone exchange engineer. They reversed the numbers to make tap dialling more difficult. However, where I lived most numbers started with eight, so that kind of back fired. And I found out that only the first three digits needed to be tapped in a pay-phone. You could just dial the rest.
@@xanataph I heard that the reason us Kiwis dial 111 instead of 999 in an emergency is because the government got a "super" deal on a shipload of backwards phones some other country rejected! The story came up during an interview on National Radio.🤔
@@tomobedlam297 Actually some Telex techs back in the day said something to me to that effect. It just seemed like a too much of a short sighted decision to really believe. Interestingly though, the Telex network had it's dials the more conventional way around.
I presume in either case of 111 or 999, it's so it takes nine pulses to dial each digit,. If you just needed a sequence of three single pulses, that would be too easy to accidentally dial by hook-flashing, although it would be faster.
Hi from NZ. The phone ringers were soo loud. I bought one for my bro in the 2000s. He didn't appreciate it. Gave him some level of post trauma stress.
NZ phones also have the zero last, not like Sweden.
You should hear one of the old mechanical bell phones when given twice the normal ring signal voltage. Don't recall why, just that it could be done from a test panel in the room where the switchboard wires were joined with the wires going out to the users. Columns of screw terminal pairs for the numbers in the station, and flat panels wire screw terminal pairs attached to the outgoing wires. If a subscriber moved, and the number should go to a new address, the wire connection between the number and outgoing line had to be changed. Possibly,vespecially if there hasn't been a previous subscriber at the new adress, a field tech had to do some connections in one or more little cabinets along the route between the station and the subscriber.
In addition to the sound of a rotary phone, loved the sound of the racks of electromechanical 500-selectors in the station. Remember walking between them with a list of numbers who hadn't paid their bill, sticking little plastic pegs between contact elements, either to block only outgoing calls, or both directions... Not the same thing sitting in front of a screen typing commands for the same thing for the computerised (AXE) part of the station. (different number series were converted at different times)
Sweden SOS was 90 000 i think back in that days. Also i think most area code started with 0.
90000 is correct. And country code is 00, and area code is 0, and if you call a local number it’s 1-9 first. Nice and neat.
@@flekkzo Back in rotary dial days, the international prefix was 009 though.
The reason for using the number 90 000 is that you could dial a 9 end then keep dialing a number of zeros.
As long as you dialed at least four zeros you got connected. It was easy to do even in stressful situations.
Yup, Stockholm for example 08, which is why people from Stockholm are also sometimes called 08:ers or "noll åttor"
If you want one more I have one, same model and same color. Calling to Sweden didn’t require any extra actions. The switchers sorted that. But you couldn’t use a phone from the UK in Sweden.
if he doesn’t want it i’ll take it. i’m nobody special but i’ve always wanted a retro dialog
From memory, the emergency phone number in New Zealand was setup as 111 instead of 999 like in Look Mum no computer land because the NZ govt bought a UK emergency call system except phone dials in NZ went the other way round and they couldn’t change the call system so 999 became 111. I also think that the reason it was a full dial for each number in an emergency was that it made it easier for those with visual impairments but I can’t remember why exactly.
New Zealander here -- can confirm that our dials were numbered 0 to 9 clockwise. Not sure why, one explanation I heard was that it was done to get around a patent, but I have no idea if that's true. And yes, our emergency number is 111, although I think 999 and 911 also work nowadays. I think the near-full-rotation digits were chosen to minimise the chance of dialling it accidentally, but that's just a guess.
Another thing I vaguely seem to remember hearing once was that our dials used to be numbered like the British ones, but at some point they were all changed! But that seems very unlikely to me, as it would have caused a huge amount of disruption
A total guess but the visual impairment thing might be because a 1 looks the least alike compared to other numbers. It's just a vertical line, no curves to confuse.
999...
Before a dedicated emergency number you would use 0 to call the operator. Since operators were sometimes busy, emergency calls were made to wait.
The British General Post Office decided to implement a dialed system.
111 was not used since it was often triggered by equipment and wiring faults. An intermittent short would dial 1.
222 was not used sine that was an existing exchange code.
Anything starting with 0 would go to the operator.
999 was the next easiest number to find.
3 digits all the same means you don't need to remove your finger, but 911 dials faster.
Australian emergency number is 000, and the dial started at 1, so it was easy to remember but hard to dial by accident.
Old Swedish emergency nr was 90000. That was hard to dial by misstake
That's interesting. The UK emergency number is 999 because the idea was if you were incapacitated, say lying on the floor but could get to the phone, you could stick two fingers into the 9 and 0 and just rock the dial back and forth to dial the number.
When it was 90000 we could put how many zeros we wanted, only 9 and AT LEAST four zeros.
It's 112 now though.
@@SparkyFolf not planning to switch user name to Sherlock soon?
i actually have an og wall socket for that jack for when i install my ericofon (a swedish one). i live in north america. it came out of a swedish house. it sounds more sketchy than it really is - my swedish tutor was going back to visit because his family was selling a house, and he just brought one of them back for me including the cover plate. the only reason why i went the whole nine yards was that i didn’t want to chop off and rewire the end 🥴
I have one of those Swedish telephones, they used to be pretty common here in Sweden. (And new houses don’t use those electrical outlets anymore.)
Now we use the small 4-pin "RJ” style connector (which also fits into an RJ45, Ethernet, socket, (also used for the cord between the handset and main body of the phone) - allowing for selecting what service, phone/Ethernet, goes to what outlet in say an office, by switching wires around on a patch panel.
I've fixed so many phone lines and phone units, you'd think Id be tired of seeing them. Yet I never get tired of your content
The amount of frustration this man displays over a completely obsolete phone had me cracking up.
Talking about counting pulses just reminds me of a brief period when my phone's dial pad crapped out, so I flipped it over to "pulse" mode and sat there tapping the switch hook to dial out XD.
It was not fun, but it _is_ absolutely possible to do if you can keep time, you're 11 and have no money to buy a new one, and you don't mind accidentally calling the wrong people a few times, first (because you're 11 and you don't give a shit about random strangers lmfao)
i used to tap out a little beat on the handset and was able to call my mate like that :D the joys of being a kid
I used to do that when my mother put a little lock on the dial.
I used to do that just for fun
My dad knew a guy who won a bet with a telephone engineer by doing that. The engineer installed one of those special phones with a blanking plate over the dial, and bet the guy that he couldn't dial out on it. Guy promptly hammered on the switch hook and called his aunt in Australia!
Just helped my elderly aunt install her modern phone before christmas. She was using one of those grey ones until last year. She could still receive calls, but had some trouble dialing.
If not an issue with her age, it could be because a worn spring causing the speed/frequency of the pulse train of the numbers to be off...
Remember the test panel in the phone station having one of those vibratory frequency meters (using tuned leafs) and we'd ask the customer to dial 9s while observing the meter when troubleshooting calling issues... (after physically patching the customers line into the panel)
@@michaeltempsch5282 Yes, that seems very possible.
my mate's dad was a telecom engineer back in the day, yellow maestro van and everything. I was amazed one drunk evening when he picked up the receiver of his rotary dial phone and held a "clicker box" to the mouthpiece. the tones it made dialled the local chinese takeaway for our order. no fingering required. awesome.
This is crazy, but it’s so much nostalgia for me. This particular phone you have on the video is from my hometown! As you can see, the phone number starts with 035 which is the city code for the town Halmstad! We had them in schools and etc. it was a common model to buy for many city/government institutions. Where in the world is this phone now?
Looks like this phone once had a home in Halmstad.
Once upon a time I had to write firmware for phone equipment. So part of the per country settings was which rule to use for translating digits into pulses. If I remember correctly, there were 3 different variants. New Zealand and Oslo used the third system with 10 pulses for 0. 9 pulses for 1. 8 pulses for 2 etc.
There were also a bit of difference for different countries what the pulse length/pause should be and the allowed min/max pause between digits.
Oslo is the capital of Norway. All of Norway has the same system, not just Oslo.
@@calysagora3615 Are you commenting of actual historic knowledge, or commenting based on "I believe"?
Note that Norway no longer supports decadic dialing, as specified by the current ETSI standard which means that any older differences between Oslo and the rest of the country on impulse counts are no longer relevant.
As of the current standard, dialing in Norway must use DTMF.
Sweden here. Never thought of this growing up with these kinds of phones. Thank you for the flash from the past 👍😁
I used to get in to trouble for playing with my grandma’s rotary phone, I loved it. I had an antique one of my own to Play with for years
This brings back memories! We had one of those white rotary phones when I was a kid.
Never knew this, and I had family in Sweden. I learn something new every day!
information I didn’t know I needed, thanks youtube recommendations
I'm from Sweden, this is very interesting and I had no idea there was such a difference between old rotary phones across the world..
Around the world they use the 1 to 9 and then 0, in fact the only countries deviating are NZ and Sweden.
Now we're talking! THat grey chunk was found in every home in the 70's. We had four or something like that.
Grew up in NZ, can confirm. Though we never needed to change any numbers because that was handled at the exchange.
🇳🇿 yea boi my grandparents had a rotary ph in Rotoua...that was a fun ph to use ❤️
Born 79 and we still had those funky swedish rotary dialers when I grew up. :)
I was born in 90 and they where still very common during my childhood and teenage years.
Remember those from when i was a kid. Phone in question is called Ericsson Dialog for anyone wondering.
Hearing the rotary phone again sounds so satisfying no matter where the zero is placed x3
This is actually fascinating!
Who has dialed a number using the hook instead of the dial on one of those types of phone? It was always a fun challenge 😀
Easy :)
I actually did that once when I first figured out how pulse dialing worked. Parents made me stop doing it because the pulse dialing would ring all the touch-tone phones in the house. 😅
This also worked in phone boxes and made it possible to dial for free.
Hook? Explain
Yep, in my teens it became a habit.
I remember using the rotary phone at my grandparents when I was a kid. Something satisfyingly analog about it, i cant describe it..
Truly pioneers, in programming and digital technology you always start counting at zero. They were way ahead of their time!
Man i loved these phones when you could just slam it down ending the call in style 😂hearing that ringing sound thinking you broke it than puting it to your ear cheking if it's still working.
That is so interesting. I love coming across random vids like this. Now, I am very bored and have been minimally day drinking, but I know I'm not the only one that thinks this is neat. I love rotary phones anyway. They are so effing cool.
I'm swedish and my grandmother has 3 if these at her house, 1 in the workshop, 1 in the living room and 1 in the kitchen, she has a samsung flip phone but keeps the others as they make her remember her dead husband who put them up in the first place (aka my grandfather)
This is just a different overlay on the rotary dial. It also implies that the wiring at the exchange was different, and such a simple difference too.
We had a phone like that when I was a kid. Stopped using then in the 90s
Awesome it's amazing you even know what a rotary phone is let alone how to dial outside of the country
I grew up with one of those phones. Took it to bits trying to hack it when I was about 10. I did reassemble it to working order again.
In New Zealand, the numbers ran the opposite way round the dial too 🙃
It was so fun playing with these phones when they still worked on traditional landlines
I’m 27 and when I was a kid I used to get looked after by this elderly lady. She’s let me dial on her rotary phone for her when she needed to make a call. Good times.
We had a phone like that when I was a kid. With the numbers offset by one because even though Finland imported Swedish phones, we did have the numbers in their normal places.
Vienna changed in the 1950s the rotary disc in 3 months from 0-1 and letters to 1-0. The old numbers had a letter first, the new telephone book was with numbers only.
Im from Canada and i remember in my grandmother's house she had a rotary phone with the zero at the beginning
I learned how to make calls on a rotary phone in the early 90s. My grandparents had one. Also, I was the kind of kid who would watch a commercial, see something cool, then be bummed I couldn't order it because we didn't have a 'touch-tone phone'.
The funky connector is actually genius, it means you can connect loads of devices to one plug, without overloading the system, because the device in use would simply disconnect all subsequent devices.
Zero comes last in other countries? That's like Americans having the first day of the week during the week END. You crazy people!
I miss these types of phones 🥺
I hooked a rotary dial up to an LED yesterday to watch it flashing and count the blinks; that's how I found out that the pulse rate is faster than my persistence of vision. I could only see half the pulses with the naked eye! I had to film the LED in slow motion to make sure the dial was working right.
My grandma has those at her house, though they have more modern connector things and they’re a pretty green.
The sound they make are soooo loud so when we visit she turns them off. :))
The emergency number was 90.000 in Sweden before we changed to 112. It was a way of making the dial faster.
My two tone mustard & brown wall mount rotary phone is extremely !!!loud when it rings,
& also the emergency number here in Australia is 000 which is the furthest number away on the dial which doesn’t exactly speed up the process .
International dialling... Oh what fun!
I know in the UK international exchanges they had whole floors dedicated to interfacing different country's systems. Now I know why!
Every trumpet player understands this on a spiritual level.
That swedish phone looks exactly like the phone we had in our summer-cottage before grandma became too cool for such old phones and learned how to use a cell phone properly🧐 (Plus it would be unused all time except four calls a year.😅🤫) so I think that we either sold it or threw it away. I live in Sweden. Oh, and having the “0”first makes sense since all the area codes would (and still) start with that, for example Gothenburg is “031”.
Edit: this phone is from Halmstad/ the county of Halland since it starts with “035”
No it doesn't make any sense.
@@suprememasteroftheuniverse why?
I remember in the late 90s when I was in my later teenage years,, we had cordless phones ever since I was about 10 but my mother got fed-up got rid of all the cordless and went back to old-school rotary to try to tame my teenage Ways,,, I bought a cordless and kept it in my room lol
I'm 20 years old and I recently bought a landline that works over Internet I had an old telephone that used Pulse Instead of touch tone I had to buy a converter Which was extremely expensive
No, it's becasue our emergency nr were 90 000 before we changed it to 112 in Sweden so it was like that to be able to dial it fast.
It was a bummer do to dial the right amount of zeros
I had a radio shack “touch tone” style phone that sent out the pulses for the analog circuits
035. Its from Halmstad in Sweden :)
Didn't know I needed to know this but - thank you !
You didn’t need to know this - he is just wasting our time.
That’s a sweet decoder phone sweedin came up with.
I remember when rotary phones was still common, some people who made a lot of calls in their work would just keep the finger in the hole that's furthest from the stopper (I think it was 0 here) and just dial every number by moving the correct distance by muscle memory. Looked pretty bad ass.
I think you could speed it up a little bit by helping the dial along to send the pulses slightly faster. But if you did it too fast it would fail.
Thats Why you can use and old phreakers trick, you can send the pulse using the hangup function. 1x = 0 2x =1
Oh my, I miss those phones
New Zealand rotary dials still have the "0" in the ten pulse position. But the 1-9 digits are reversed. So 9 is one pulse and 1 is nine pulses, which is different again to Sweden's dial arrangement. However, the Telex system here used the more conventional & sensible arrangement of 1 is one pulse etc.
You are not wrong. Where’s best to get a new Zealand rotary? It’s proven to be a pain in the ass to get
When I was much younger, the pub I frequented had a phone on the counter for wives to call the bar and find their husbands. But this phone had no dial for calling out. It was for incoming calls only. But if you knew the secret of pulse dialing, you could tap the hook button and make it dial out by tapping out the desired phone number.
Rotary phones. My aunt used to have one 20 years ago and even then it was an antiquity.
Telephone sets talk to the phone switch, not other phones. Thus, the Swedish phones received pulses and translating the pulse patterns into standard codes when talking to other switches. It probably gets humorously complicated when making local calls in a fashion that only appeals to ex-AT&T employees or contractors, or Nortel ones.
Yes indeed I was referring to using an international phone in Sweden which was illegal but people still did it. There is international exchange transfera
I remember when I was at Disney Land in the 70’s, and a display had a push button phone and I thought it was SOOOOO cool! But even after we later got a push button phone, it still made the clicking sound after each number.
Because the method for signalling the station what number to connect to was still pulses. The buttons just told the phone how many times to pulse a relay, which would make clicky noises.
Later changed to tone signalling, each button made the phone send a mix of two tones, one for row and one for column for the numbers place in the standard matrix (even if it was a funky phone with the buttons in some other layout, such as a circle)
I was today years old when I learned how a rotary phone dialed the numbers...🤦♀️ I mean like I knew how to use one but I didn't know that the sound you were hearing was electrical pulses.. or that that literally translated to the number you were calling
I remeber those wierd plugs. Also the old emergency services number used to be 90000, as it was a full rotation and then 4 0's.
I’ll never get over the thought of trying to call 999 on a rotary and it just takes forever
This is actually super interesting 🤔 thanks
In Australia the emergency number is 000 the longest to dial on a rotary phone.
NZ and the UK got their phones backwards.
999 took ages to dial in the UK.
111 took ages to dial in NZ.
Love the electrical 🔌!
All the cool kids always dialed their phones using a pencil or pen to stick in the hole because your fingers got pinched or were too fat, though.
Thats a reason for the zero first. Swedish phone grid has area codes that starts with a zero, so you have to dial a zero first to call everywhere other than local. So it´s logical to have the zero first, makes you dial faster.
You don't need to add 1 to each number. Your UK phone plugged into a uk socket connects to a UK exchange. The number is translated inside the telecoms network.
You have earned my sub. You are hilarious
First (and last) time I used a rotary phone was at my Grandma's like 20 years ago. I was around 10yo. That was surreal.
Wooww just in time! Thanks
hehe, sarcasm
And they made great defense weapons.
My grandmother had exactly one of those gray ones! Ghostphone!
I actually used one exactly like that, same color as well, when I was a kid.
In New Zealand the dial is 0 to 9. 10 pulses for a zero, 1 pulse for 9
One could tap the hangup button with the appropriate number of taps as pulses and make calls without using the dial.
It hilarious how he said "That's pretty FUNKY"
This just taught me how to use one of these on a basic idea
Here in New Zealand the emergency number is 111 and I believe it was 000 The same as Australia when we used the phones like that
So made it faster to dial than the 911 or what ever number
Interchangeable bezels are a thing also stickers.
Hey, just stopping here to tell you: great content.
Cya!
This is what happens when you give the same job to 2 engineers. You'll end up with at least 3 different solutions to the same problem, and they''ll all be incompatible with each other. 🤣
You underestimate the ability of engineers, if you don't think one is enough to create a great quagmire of incompatible solutions to the same problem for no reason.
// Engineering student
@@TheGlassgubben I think that's true if the engineer actually cares about what they do. Most of the ones I've met (outside the military anyway) seem to be more interested in what coffee is in the break room. Even so, I'd love to know who thought it was sufficiently horrifying to put a 0 after a 9 that they changed a whole country's phone network to "fix" it...
@@McTroyd Coffee's important in the break room though we engineers are more concerned with having a proper chair to sit in while we solve everyone elses problems.
@@NostromoStarship2 Makes perfect sense. 😉
The greatest thing about standards is that everyone can have their own...
I swear this has me laughing so bad 😂😂😂😂😂