Q. numeric keypads vs. telephones (Q on history?)
OK, here is something which has annoyed me since I first saw a digital phone(instead of a rotary dial) ... why are the numbers on numeric keypads (and calculators) not in the same order as on phones or vice versa?
Numeric keypads on keyboards and calculators have been around for at least a century longer than on phones. The century thing I am thinking of tills* in stores, keyboards later along with calculators.
Then we have the silly little telephones where they(and who the **** are "they" in this case(probably the "all knowing" US FCC!)) decided to reverse the numbers around and start from the top instead of bottom.
Why?
I am not so sure I care why the tills/keyboards/calculators started one trend but rather the other, i.e. why didn't non-rotary phones continue the "trend" ?
*and I've actually seen a really old till where the numbers started from the top but only two rows instead of three (plus 0 etc).
B'uh hoombuuug(gery!)!
Numeric keypads on keyboards and calculators have been around for at least a century longer than on phones. The century thing I am thinking of tills* in stores, keyboards later along with calculators.
Then we have the silly little telephones where they(and who the **** are "they" in this case(probably the "all knowing" US FCC!)) decided to reverse the numbers around and start from the top instead of bottom.
Why?
I am not so sure I care why the tills/keyboards/calculators started one trend but rather the other, i.e. why didn't non-rotary phones continue the "trend" ?
*and I've actually seen a really old till where the numbers started from the top but only two rows instead of three (plus 0 etc).
B'uh hoombuuug(gery!)!
Post edited by ZnorXman on
Comments
It yielded this:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question641.htm
I rekcon some arrogant arse just deisgned it differently.
Probably the same person responsbile for Walkers crisps having GREEN Salt and Vinegar crisps, when everyone else was blueuy , just so that I would still buy the wrong ones.
Or as thx1138 says it was designed by a complete arse.
also the numbers had to go in that order for the alphabet to work, if they had gone the way the keypads go then all the letters would have been in the wrong order
this is the real reason and all that long stuff on the article above is speculation
Thinking about this, the lettering on rotary dial phones of course started ABC on the digit 2. So if you used the calculator keypad layout for a phone, the letters would have looked like this:
7 8 9 PQRS TUV WXYZ 4 5 6 GHI JKL MNO 1 2 3 ABC DEF 0So guesser's guess sounds entirely plusable - if you look at how a telephone keypad is laid out the letters read left to right, top to bottom - whereas if the calculator keypad layout had been used you get the bottom-to-top thing you see above. Since push button phones were developed first in the United States where using the letters was (and still is) absolutely pervasive, it's the letters that ended up driving it.
So the upshot: like many other things, it was backwards compatibility with an earlier technology with a massive installed base that caused the layout we now see.
I like this explanation about the arrangement of the letters!
Thanks guesser/Winston/everyone :-)
quite the opposite, before STD you didn't need letters, the letters correspond to the area codes, after the 0, 1 that they added, the first two letters of the charging area (in almost all cases) are the letters of the town, then the third letter is random. before STD you asked the operator to connect to the remote exchange so you didn't need a letter-number coding
The natural way to 'read' is top to bottom..not bottom to top.
my thoughts exactly
They can dial a number on there phone, and use a calculator, with ease not realising the numbers are in different places.
No, that's not entirely right. Letters for local dialing codes predated STD. There was a plan to use letters to also denote the new STD codes, but those plans never really came to fruition and were abandoned by the time STD became widespread - hence there are a few STD codes that *do* map to sensible letters on the telephone dial, but the overwhelming majority do not, and hence also the letters never appeared on rotary dial phones from the 1960s onwards. (I think lettered dialing was abandoned altogether by 1968 and STD wasn't completed till the late 70s).
Letters on phone dials in the UK were used for the pre-STD director exchanges found in large cities (places like London or Manchester which had 7 digit dialing back in the 1950s). You can still see the legacy of director exchanges today - large cities like Manchester that still have numbers such as 0161-437-2897, which before Phoneday was 061-437-2897, and prior to STD, was simply 437-2897. It was the 437 that had a mapping to letters on the telephone dial. The STD 061 doesn't map to anything sensible - the 0 doesn't have a letter, neither does the 1 (edit: well, I suppose the 6 maps to M). Director exchanges were a distinct kind of equipment until the old Strowger mechanical equipment disappeared in the 80s and 90s, to replaced by digital system-X and system-Y exchanges. Even in the case of director exchanges, local areas mapping onto letters on the phone dial were all dropped by the mid 1960s because it simply became impractical to give any sort of sensible mappings as the number of local exchanges burgeoned in big cities.
Letters on UK telephone keypads have only recently come back with texting and non-telco services that can use them.
Bit of trivia: even in the 1980s and early 90s, Strowger exchanges in the UK generated the tones (dial tone, ring tone, engaged, number unobtainable etc.) not with a solid state piece of kit but with an electric motor! (Called a Ringer 2A).
There's a rack of working Strowger equipment in the London Science Museum which you can play with. I like getting all 8 telephones in use, then replacing the handsets all at once. The glorious sound of all the bidirectional selectors returning home is enough to make a brave man weep.
I think you are still missing the point, find a list of charging areas, and look at all the area codes, ignore the 01 or 02 at the beginning, and for the vast majority they are the correct letters, apart from new developments, or where there are more than 9 places starting with those letters.
for example here I am 01400, 01-HO-0 HO for honnington
Lincoln is I think LC
obviously the london ones don't work.
the other thing is, a lot will seem not to work, but the name of the exchange is not the name of the town.
oh you have to love mechanical exchanges, beautiful things
I have the GPO book with all the diagrams of the exuipment, and all the measurements specified for the exchanges, down to the distance from the ceiling to the light bulb
No, I'm not missing the point at all. The point is - why are telephone keypads laid out the way they are, and this is fundamentally because they were developed in North America where at the time the use of letters in telephone numbers was (and still is) pervasive.
By contrast, in the UK, the use of letters was first adopted for director exchanges, then for a short time for STD codes, but dropped by the mid 1960s when it became impractical to assign new meaningful letter codes to STDs or director exchanges (look at any rotary dial phone made from that time onwards, they are numbers only). So the telephone keypad as it appears in the UK was just an adoption of the precedent set in the USA, which in turn was set by the still pervasive use of letters in phone numbers there.
Had the development happened the other way around - i.e. the GPO in the UK had got rid of Strowger exchanges in the late 60s, developed DTMF dialing and the pushbutton phone instead of the Americans, we could well have ended up with telephone keypads that were laid out the same as calculator key pads.
one is a game, against the clock of knowing your area codes :)
and the second is the GPO man, you have to run around the exchange, changing valves in the amplifiers, and oiling the 2-motion selectors! :)
perhaps a bonus level where you have to set the line equalisers correctly :)
ach, what the hey, the reason still stands that the keys are laid out because of the letters though cause the US trunk dialling system used names too right? :)
edit ah you said that, so yes
He recounts stories about doing the night shift, and hearing a solitary call stepping its way across the exchange. As well as the evenings where it was unusually quiet, and then suddenly, the calls started coming, building into a deafening racket of selectors working overtime. The reason? No, not an impending nuclear apocalypse. A controversial ending to Coronation Street!
The mechanical exchanges are so cool because they seem alive. Modern digital ones, while superior in every respect, are just boxes with whirring fans.
(Joke Winston!)
they're so beautiful from an engineering point of view, the rows and rows of steppers, and shiny contacts, all manufactured to precision.
Modern exchanges are just glorified computers.
If you ever visit Staffordshire, the Churnet Valley Steam Railway uses a pair of restored MNDX wagons for their phone system!
hehe terrible!
The numeric keypad arrangement I think has more to do with how our brains are trained :- up and right = more, both being associated with +. This would mean 789 should be on the top row. I'm sure someone at some time tested this arrangement to see if data entry was faster and more accurate.
Perhaps a search of copyright or patents could explain the different arrangement too?
The North American dialing system never placed importance on lettering in its numbers as the UK system apparently did (ie LC = lincoln). Any numeric / alpha associations were entirely accidental (with a handful of exceptions); the letters were only used as a mnemonic tool. It was only in a few regions that the exchange number (the first 3 digits of a seven digit number) was commonly referenced as a two-letter/one-digit combination easily extracted from a full word. This has long since been abandoned but you can hear cute references to this in old movies. It seems humans *are* able to remember 7 digit phone numbers without having these mnemonic tools.
These days the letters are mainly used by corporations and other organizations to construct easily remembered telephone numbers added to the toll-free dialing scheme. Just like IBM might want its website at "www.ibm.com" it might also want a toll-free number "1-800-9CALLIBM" or somesuch.
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
(this whole thing is pointless and could be done with a bit of client side javascript like every other bank does, but hey, it makes it LOOK more secure)
it made me realise chip and pin machines/ATMs have the numbers in the sensible order, so it's only calculators and computer keyboards
Ooo yes I've had a play with them - fantastic!
An utterly pointless waste of resources.
128-bit encryption is probably good enough for your average bloke paying a £30 bill or whatever. If they're going to get your bank details it's more likely to be because Natwest threw them in non-secure bins around the back of the bank or some other way, not by intercepting your details through your online banking log-in.
Having said all that though, the only reason I've kept by bank account with Natwest open for the last year is because I'm waiting for the judgment on fees and also because they won't let you have a loan (mine finishes next month) with them unless you keep the account open.
This is not about man-in-the-middle attacks, which as you already note, SSL is already good enough to prevent, but about phishing attacks and key loggers. A phisher or key logger could get all your login details, but without having the card reader and your card, will not be able to set up any new transfers. For a phisher to be able to set up a payment to their own accounts they would now need a multi-level attack which would also include a "man in the middle" to get hold of a valid challenge/response pair, which makes it orders of magnitude more difficult for phishing attacks to succeed.
Many people are vulnerable to phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks; most people using online banking today are not security or computing savvy, so these card readers significantly improve the security for these people.
Also, all PCs should be sold with spyware and a/v software that automatically updates. I can't believe there are PCs still being sold that don't.
And to be quite honest, if you fall for phishing, you really shouldn't be banking online in the first place.
um wtf?
this is the worst idea I've ever heard, PCs should be sold with NO BUNDLED CRAP
the fact that so many have a years subscription to some hideous software like norton or mcaffe is a pain in the arse, especially since they're so hard to remove before you can install a decent a/v