
999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number - DamonHD
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/999-emergency-services-phone-number-80-years-old-anniversary-police-fire-ambulance-telephone-a7815946.html
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sambeau
I'm reminded of this:

    
    
      Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his
      longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.
      But for most of Woz's life there were no Silicon Valley exchanges with
      three matching digits, so Woz had to be satisfied with numbers like
      221-1111. Then, one day, while eavesdropping on cell phone calls, Woz
      begin hearing a new exchange: 888. And then, after more months of
      scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone
      number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.
      
      The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong
      numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to
      misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was
      never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or,
      not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a
      television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or
      Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.
      
      Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman
      say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver
      was snatched up and slammed down. Suddenly, it all made sense: the
      hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They
      were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of
      the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep
      beep beep beep."
      
      The children of America were making their first prank call.
      
      And the person who answered the phone was Woz.
    

[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1lduxa/til_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1lduxa/til_steve_wozniak_was_the_first_owner_of_the/)

~~~
Theodores
...and this reminds me of the time I emailed 'Fred' at 'gmail.com'. Actually
'Fred's' email was 'email.fred@gmail.com' however I mis-heard the 'email.'
part even after verbally confirming the address as it seemed too concise.

So I send expected email, to then get a reply from the real 'fred@gmail.com',
this obviously not being my contractor friend. Turns out that this happens all
the time - well considered, properly written emails of significance had been
arriving in 'Fred's' inbox, each of them having to be politely returned as
'Fred' was ethical that way...

There are downsides to 'ideal' email addresses as well as 'ideal' phone
numbers.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I have an email address that is the.myfirstname.mylastname@popularservice.com

I repeatedly emailed myself from my work email address to
myfistname.mylastname@popularservice.com - I kept forgetting the "the." at the
start of _my own_ email address. I only realised when the owner of the other
address politely wrote back asking me to stop doing this. I hadn't noticed
because the emails were just autohotkey script backups and xml files
containing machine settings for a laser cutter and I wasn't really paying
attention as to whether I had received them or not.

Anyway, I got tired of trying to spell english-word email address to people
over the phone, so I registered a domain and now have an unambiguous email
address a364 athingy k45j dotthingy com - it's heaps easier to say and write
down and _nobody_ has a similar address because I own the domain.

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pcunite
I remember a commercial from the 80's for an emergency number described as
"dial 800 then keep dialing 9".

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ycaspirant
Why isn't there an app for this?

I live in a country where emergency services are completely unreliable, so my
main experience of 911 / 999 emergency services is from television and films,
and I've noticed a fair amount of friction in the phone call process,
especially when it comes to verbally communicating the address. In addition to
the phone number, wouldn't it be useful to also have native apps for this
which optionally grant GPS access and camera access at the touch of a button?

~~~
JdeBP
If you want to learn more about this, then I suggest reading about the several
and various initiatives that there have been over the past few years, in the
U.K., the U.S.A., and elsewhere, to deal with with the problem of VOIP and
mobile telephones. They have included things such as (for example) the idea
that the immediately upstream ISP, for VOIP, populates an ESDB/ALIDB with
location data that it knows because it knows the physical location of the VOIP
connection to its network.

The names that you want to start with are "Enhanced 911" and "Next Generation
911".

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e0
This is also the subject of the latest "Seriously..."

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05711xn](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05711xn)

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singularity2001
999 is the perfect number for germans as nine-nine-nine is homophonic to nein-
nein-nein, meaning no-no-no!!!

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TeMPOraL
There was an article on Tedium just ~1 week ago about the emergency numbers!

[http://tedium.co/2017/06/20/911-emergency-system-
history/](http://tedium.co/2017/06/20/911-emergency-system-history/)

It references the birth of 999, but then continues with the story of emergency
numbers in the US. Definitely an interesting read.

~~~
notwhoyouthink
Yikes, the font on that website is incredibly distracting. Hard enough that I
went and downloaded Readability for Chrome just to get through the article.

Reading more than a sentence caused my eyes to sort of glaze over and even
when trying to focus I was reading but not grasping. Can't say I've ever had a
font do that to me.

~~~
aquadrop
In cases like this, you can just "inspect" on the text block, find the rule
for the font-family and set whatever font you like, no need for extensions :)

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noncoml
999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take
almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.

~~~
gerdesj
I'm sure I wont be the first or the last to point out that you are clearly too
young to remember pulse dialing with a rotary input device.

The whole point of 999 was that a nine was the only number you could guarantee
to accurately dial blind on a rotary input device with only your sense of
touch and a little knowledge about the device itself available to you.

I'm also not too sure why any other number would be preferable. 999 really
stands out whereas all the other emergency numbers across the world do not.
I'll accept that because I'm a Brit that I have been conditioned to 999 being
THE emergency number might bias me somewhat but I think my point still stands:
999 is far more obvious than any other emergency number.

I do a lot of (modern ie VoIP) telephony work and can only think that the 9
for an outside line plus rubbish dial plans and crap hardware and programming
meant that 999 might not work for some systems. I've also explored the "not
British" criteria for the number ... 8)

Can anyone explain why 999 is not the best emergency number ever chosen?

~~~
microcolonel
The problem is the amount of time you spend waiting for the dial to return. At
the standard rate of ten pulses per second, you would end up waiting nine
pulses three times or (0.9 * 3)s plus the pause (approximately 3 pulses wide)
for the dial to return, plus however long it took you to finger and wind the
dial three times. Could easily take upward of six seconds.

111 (if it could feasibly be allocated) would be the best three-digit code.
You would spend the least amount of time rewinding, fingering, and returning.
The minimum time per symbol would be 0.1s for the single pulse, ~0.3 seconds
for the pause (that section on the dial between the backstop and the 1 digit
hole) and about 0.1-0.2s for the finger and wind (reduced due to Fitts's law,
and easier for the blind since it is the first hole from the backstop rather
than the second). These factors combined could cut the dial time easily in
half.

~~~
wlll
Realistically waiting an extra 6 seconds in an emergency isn't going to make
much, if any, difference in the average home emergency situation.

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elpocko
I'll just stick to good old 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

~~~
bitJericho
Well that's easy to remember.

