7 ms·
Long before most of you were born there was a special number you could call to get the time here in the USA. It would give you a localized time every 10 seconds
by tomcam 1mo ago
Long before most of you were born there was a special number you could call to get the time here in the USA. It would give you a localized time every 10 seconds. It was considered an authoritative value, but I knew that normal analog clocks drifted a fair amount, and I was fascinated by the Time voice.
There was also a special number to dial that was called Information. When I was about 12, I suddenly thought that’s amazing, you can just call and get information. What I didn’t know at the time was that it only applied to phone numbers.
One day, I called Information and asked them how accurate the time number was and what mechanism was used to deliver it. Incredibly, they connected my preadolescent self to a public relations person at AT&T. That person somehow took me seriously and hooked me up with another party. And that person told me about the cesium atomic clock used to keep track of the time.
Later, I would call Information to find out the acreage occupied by the Los Angeles Zoo, and it was then that they brusquely explained to me that the number was not for general knowledge.
- OuterVale 1mo agoHere in Australia we had a number that gave you the time called 'George the talking clock'. https://1194online.com https://1194online.com
- aftbit 1mo agoThis has been reimplemented as a tribute by a modern phone phreak named Shaun Ewing, who also created Lenny. https://se.au/notes/george-the-talking-clock-lives-on/ https://se.au/notes/george-the-talking-clock-lives-on/ Number Region 02 8403 1194 Sydney/Melbourne/Canberra 08 7078 7794 Adelaide 07 3667 9594 Brisbane 08 7918 0808 Darwin 08 6244 3294 Perth
- OuterVale 1mo agoThanks for sharing this with me!
- chickensong 1mo agoIn Northern California the number corresponded to POP-CORN, so if you wanted to know the time you called popcorn, and got a lovely lady's voice: "At the tone, the time will be...". The POP prefix was a shortcut to the phone company.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_presence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_presence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names#Standardization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names#Stand... 76x-nnnn: POplar, POrter, ROckwell, ROger(s), SOuth(field) 411 Directory Assistance in 1978 https://youtu.be/UpsGpZ7wi9k?si=gSKP2K7WGPn-cbBj&t=60 https://youtu.be/UpsGpZ7wi9k?si=gSKP2K7WGPn-cbBj&t=60
- globular-toast 1mo agoThat's brilliant. Sometimes talking to real humans is great. It reminds me of two things. When I was a child I was given a postage stamp and wrote a letter to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and posted it. Remarkably, I got a reply from Aardman Animations with a card signed by Nick Park himself. Someone at Royal Mail obviously understood and looked up the real address of the studio. Later as a teen I noticed the clock on our oven displayed "24:00" at midnight instead of the more conventional "0:00"[0]. I wrote to the manufacturer (Neff) on a support channel and it actually got forwarded through several departments before I received a reply from an engineer quoting ISO8601 and how it doesn't actually specify that midnight has to be 0:00 (although, sadly, I never received a positive reason for why someone made the oven clock like this). For those of us who remember such interactions it's even more frustrating when you find there's a dumb robot at the end of the line. Even if it's LLM powered. I actually asked ChatGPT what it would do with the Wallace and Gromit letter and it couldn't find the same solution. We lost a lot with Google-style faceless companies. As for the time, in the UK we had (have?) "The Talking Clock" which you could get to by dialling 123. This was well enough known in 2001 to be a key part of this scene from The Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdBCFV6qa3A&t=146 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdBCFV6qa3A&t=146 [0] I just looked this up again and, funnily enough, John Ward showed a similar oven on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_oLT7lWQ44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_oLT7lWQ44
- ahazred8ta 1mo agoIn Canada, Santa's postcode is H0H 0H0. In the 1800s a letter addressed Sromfidevi England was eventually delivered to Sir Humphry Davy.
- inigyou 1mo agoWhen I was about 10 I wrote a letter to Microsoft and they sent me back a package of Visual Studio (real licensed edition that didn't display a dialog box every time you ran a compiled program!) and, on two CDs and in HTML Help format, MSDN Library.
- crimony 1mo agoI like that both 0:00 and 24:00 exist. If you say "midnight, August 12", do you mean at the start or the end of the day? There might be a convention, but I don't know it so others probably don't either. With 0:00 and 24:00 and a date, you can disambiguate a time precisely.
- matwood 1mo agoFor the kids out there, calling a number for recorded information was common in the 90s I guess? Movie times was a big one. Where I was locally, multiple surf shops did 3-4x daily surf reports. The later was a bit funny because if one of the usual update times was missed you knew the waves were good and the guy was surfing :)
- chickensong 1mo ago777-FILM "Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!"
- weinzierl 1mo agoAlso, where I live, radio transmitted the precise time in the most low tech way possible. A person said: "It is XX:XX time with the beep" and this was followed by four beeps, three short, one long, with the end of the last beep signifying the exact moment of the announced time.
- nofunsir 1mo agoListen to "What Time Is It?" by Ken Nordine. It's a treat.
- fipar 1mo agoWe had a similar time service in Uruguay and, whenever we had an important appointment (e.g., a medical one) we’d call the number to make sure our clocks and watches were on time. It was a female voice that said something that could be translated to “the signal will mark it is <time>,” and, the funny thing is, between the way it had been recorded and the fact that signal (señal) and lady (señora) can sound very similar in Spanish when over the phone and followed by a vowel (“indicará” for will mark in this case), a lot of us thought it said “the lady will mark” and, as a little kid, I thought there was an old time-keeping lady on whom we all depended to be in sync. Miss NTP I guess!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kilroy123 1mo agohttps://popcornph.one https://popcornph.one You mean popcorn?
- gmiller123456 1mo agoThe one we used is still active JU-55961 (area code 502), only difference is it plays an ad first. It had a little jingle used to memorize it, so I still remember it today. I searched the internet for that number, and apparently there were hundreds of these JU numbers for different services.
- alnwlsn 1mo agoYou actually can still call NIST and hear the signal broadcast from WWV[0], though that's probably different from the telephone time of day you're thinking of, which might have come from one of these machines [1] in a local telephone exchange. [0] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-distribution/radio-station-wwv/telephone-time-day-service https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-di... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audichron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audichron
- aftbit 1mo agoThere are still a ton of time numbers kicking around. My local phone company still offers (513) 721-1700 and I have (513) 241-1010 burned into my memory from dialing it a million times as a kid playing with the phone. Plus you can hear two signals from NIST themselves: (303) 499-7111 - WWV (John Doyle) (808) 335-4363 - WWVH (Jane Barbe) - in Hawaii, might cost extra to call depending on plan And there are these two offered by US Naval Observatory in Washington (202) 762-1069 (202) 762-1401 Plenty more out there if you do some Googling.
- NetMageSCW 1mo agoI built a phone accessed service for a school system some time ago, programming an off-the-shelf call handler and adding an industrial thermometer. When you called it would tell you the time and temperature and whether school would open normally, open late or be closed due to weather. School staff could call in and change the message setting.