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Back then you never needed to dial your own area code unless you traveled far away and called home. At least not where I lived. So it’s no skin off your back th

• reaperducer 5y ago
  Back then you never needed to dial your own area code unless you traveled far away and called home. Back when there were lots and lots of small local telephone companies within a single area code, where I lived you didn't have to even dial all seven numbers. As long as you were calling within the same phone company, you only needed the last five digits. So calling the neighbor across the street was just 2-3342. But calling someone you knew who was a mile away in a different phone company, you had to do the whole 867-5309. There were some people you knew who lived across the border in another state, and for most of them you had to dial all 11 digits. But some of the small phone companies operated on both sides of the state line, so you could still dial people with 9-9845, even though they were in a different area code in a different state. It was also billed as a local call, which made the BBS I ran the main e-mail exchange point between those two area codes for the store-and-forward BBS network I belonged to.
• function_seven 5y ago
  I was mostly joking about the envy of lower codes. DTMF had long replaced pulse dialing when the 909 NPA was created. Still supported, but even my grandparents had touch-tone phones.