Re:Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
by bencoder on Sunday August 30, 2015 @06:25AM
(#10142933)
I definitely remember (as a child in the UK) that our touch-tone phone had a pulse option that could be switched on the underside. If you flicked the switch then instead of a tone you would hear click-click-click-click when you pressed a number. This would have been in the early to mid-90s, though we were quite poor so the phone might have been older.
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Re:Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
by makomk on Sunday August 30, 2015 @07:53AM
(#10143070)
It took quite a long time for the UK phone system to be converted to support tone dialing everywhere so there were still places in the UK where pulse dialing was required. The last Strowger exchange, where the pulses directly stepped the switches, was only taken out of service in 1995.
There were phones out there that had a keypad but only supported pulse dialing too; if I remember correctly, my parents had one when I was a kid.
Re:Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
by neverknowsbest on Monday August 31, 2015 @12:43PM
(#10147655)
Canada was like this in the 80ies through early 90ies as well -- if it was a rotary phone, it always pulse dialed. But a bunch of the push button models had the switch so you could do either. Tonal dialing was so much quicker!