4 ms·
I wonder if the 411 and 911 calls were due to pulse dialing triggering on an intermittent connection. There are probably a few other folks of my age who remembe
by pjdesno 2y ago
I wonder if the 411 and 911 calls were due to pulse dialing triggering on an intermittent connection. There are probably a few other folks of my age who remember discovering that you could dial a phone by tapping the hook at the right speed - after all, all that a rotary phone dial does is disconnect and reconnect the line at about 10Hz. If a wire was just loose enough that it was disconnecting intermittently, I would expect the pulse detector on the other end to detect a lot of 1s, a much smaller number of 4s, and very few 9s.
- DWakefield 2y agoI second that thought. Years ago on a Nortel PBX, we had a line in the factory where I work that had a fault. It would intermittently dial my extension (411) and I figured that it was from pulse dialing. Eventually the fault in the line was fixed and, along with that, the 'phantom' calls I received from that extension. Interesting coincidence that in both cases the number dialed was 411. I guess I'm lucky our phone didn't dial 911!