masto is very good because i can talk to someone at any time of the day or night like when i cant sleep or something. its good. good at that. thats one of the things thats good

you: what do you mean 'masto is very good' this also applies to anything in the fediverse not just masto. it also applies to anything on the internet at all!! it als--

me: *walking out of my door and to your house at 3:49 AM* WAKE UP *banging on the door* WAKE UP WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE HISTORY OF TOUCH-TONE TELEPHONES

@jk Oh, yeah, I just watched a video on that! (Gimme a sec...)

@jk Century 21 Calling, from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair
https://archive.org/details/Century21964

The "Wow! Touch-tone dialing is NEW and FAST!" section is around 6:45, right after the Solar Power section, and right before the Coming Soon section about Speed-Dial and Internet-Of-Things.

@gaditb @jk I misread this as "1862 World's Fair" and was like "wow they were really prescient"

@gaditb @jk ...in fact, that would have been like 15 years before the telephone was invented. I should have known that. (I was obsessed with the early history of telephones as a kid)

@nev @jk @gaditb

in UK we didn't even get DTMF signalling until around 1990-91 as there were still a lot of electromechanical and first generation electronic exchanges and the dialtone was different (this low frequency purr sound full of harmonics) and that upset the DTMF registers by false signalling, it had to be changed to the 350+440Hz as used in USA..

@vfrmedia @nev @jk @gaditb that kind of blows my mind that Europe was so far behind on DTMF. Some like to blame the fact European telephone systems in that era were state-owned, but I counter that assertion, as Japan's Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation was the world's largest state-owned telco beginning around 1970, and they had introduced DTMF in 4 cities in May 1969. I have a 1973 NEC DTMF set from over there!

@techfury @nev @jk @gaditb

AFAIK the Netherlands (with state owned PTT) had DTMF since 1980s or even before, it varied from region to region and depended on whether the exchange was an electronic stored program control model - Philips had a division building these so some would likely have been around in NL sooner than other countries.

Germany was (surprisingly) late but like UK they had loads of legacy electromechanical kit still in use until 1990s..

@vfrmedia @nev @jk @gaditb Japan had a network that was almost all crossbar and SPC by the end of the 1970s. Step/Strowger deployment stopped in the late 50s there, it was all XB in the 60s, and then SPC showed up with the first D10 switch cutover in 1971, making Japan the first country outside of North America with SPC switches in production. Philips' PRX followed just a year later.

@techfury @nev @jk @gaditb

Historically there was a lot of crossover of telecoms technology between NL and JP via Philips (who regularly sold rebadged Japanese equipment reconfigured for European tech standards, from consumer electronics to telecoms equipment)

interestingly NEC have now taken over the Philips business telecoms systems division (that was part of PYE in Cambridge UK..)

@vfrmedia @nev @jk @gaditb I've heard about that sort of crossover before. We didn't get that over here in the US, but Japanese PBXes were extremely common for years. NEC CO switching equipment was very popular in Latin America and the rest of Asia though. NZ was also a huge customer.

By the way, enjoy this compilation of old NTTPC commercials: https://youtu.be/2LYtqv59j1k

(Yes, they often called DTMF "pip pop pa")