Well, Dr. Tyson got a few things not quite right. For one, he said that the area code numbers were chosen so that the most *people* would have do dial the least amount of digits. Well, that was just a side benefit. The central office equipment can’t have a dialer for every telephone, so they have a certain amount of dialing equipment for every thousand telephones. It takes *longer* for the dial to dial 6, 7, 8, 9 or 0 than the lower numbers. So they assigned the lowest numbers to area codes with the most numbers of customers in order to *minimize* the amount of time and hence the amount of dialing equipment in the central offices. The telephone companies, led by AT&T, had mathematical models to calculate the ways to build the system, such as how many trunk lines between area codes or cities, and how much equipment to service the telephone lines in a central office.
So the researchers came up with the idea of dramatically reducing the dialing time (and the amount of central office equipment needed) by sending each digit by making tones instead of interrupting the current in the phone line. This was called DTMF – dual tone multi-frequency – or Touch Tone. This saved the telephone companies millions of dollars, and the (not so) brilliant marketers said, we’re going to charge the customers $1.20 a month to have the touch tone phones – yet the telephone companies were the ones who were saving millions by using touch tones!
By the way, Dr. Tyson said that you could dial by tapping on the handset microphone. No, you could simulate the dialing by tapping quickly on the hookswitch button in the cradle where the handset rests. But it was difficult to not misdial – make a mistake and dial the wrong number.
https://fb.watch/n9q7fk8i2E/?mibextid=NnVzG8