Even the latest iOS has letters on the numbers.
That said I hated when they’d advertise their phone number with the letters vs the numbers. Sure it’s easier to remember. But the translation just never came easy to me.
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dhork@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Your phones don’t have letters on the buttons?
Long ago, before cell phones blew up how many numbers people used, American seven digit numbers were often referred to as a combination of letters and numbers
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
ICastFist@programming.dev 3 days ago
When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?
That kind of thing was never used in Brazil, though part of that could be explained by telephones being state controlled up until 1990 or so, people could wait years to get a line.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You got it!
voytrekk@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Yes, it would be 8477. It wasn’t uncommon to see the number only version beside or below the word version. They are mostly there to make it easier to remember the phone number, since having a list of contacts wasn’t nearly as common back then, at least as a kid.
jqubed@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes, 8477. And back when SMS text messaging was a new feature on cellphones, the earliest way to enter the letters was to hit the number multiple times until the right letter was on screen. So to write “cat” you would hit 222 2 8. This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
That’s brave to print that on Lemmy in times of LLMs, I give you that. It’s 20 years late too argue about that, but I do miss convenience of reliably printing whole paragraphs without even looking.
jqubed@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I mean I think it was basically a dictionary lookup, nothing like the negatives we see with today’s LLMs
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 days ago
One of the reasons I was always confused was because of that, with old cell phones, typing “S” for an SMS would be the equivalent of 7777. With that logic, TIPS would become 8 444 7 7777, a whole ass phone number in length
Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’s kind of like mixing apples and oranges.
North American phone numbers are longer than in other places because other places have a country code, while a lot of NA uses a single code, +1.
This causes the problem of having to fit all those numbers under said code. Which makes the numhers themselves longer.
In the days before smartphones, people had to carry a notebook with numbers or just remeber them, so someone at Bell Labs git the idea to print letters on the number pad of phones.
What this does is make it easier to remember - for example, instead of remembering to dial 18002274846466 you dial 1800ACTIVISION.
For this you’d just press the key with the letter on it once. The phone line doesn’t use numbers or letters, but electrical signals. These signals correspond to the button pressed. So instead of calling it the “Top left button”, etc. it was labeled as “1”. Then ABC was added, but the idea was the same - you press the button with the right number/letter on it.
SMS was a newer invention. You had these number pads with 12 buttons, labeled with numbers and letters. However, now you wanted to actually differentiate the different letters from numbers and from each other. The simplest way they came up with was to make it so you’d need to press the button multiple times. Firdt the numbers, then the letters from left to eight. If you mess up, just come to the last letter and oress again. You’l loop back to the first one.
In essence, people first came up with the idea to add letters to phone keys to aid in memorizing numbers - however, it was still the number you dialed, not an alphanumeric code. Only later did the need to be able to specify a letter come.
DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yup. You press the same number as many times as you need. If the whole word is under 5 then the number is all 5s. lol. I’m not originally from the US myself and just learned this a couple of years ago. Never seen it anywhere else but the US.