History--unlisted number charge [telecom]

I recall ONI in that part of New Jersey. You'd dial the call, an operator would come on the line and ask for your number, then the call would go through.

My relatives who run a rural telco in Vermont said that in the ONI era they were constantly having to move calls from one account to another due to kids who lied to the ONI operator.

R's, John

ONI is separate from AMA--the Bell Labs history book describes other attempts at automating long distance charging. ONI is a way to get the caller's number, the other is ANI. It took years to complete ANI throughout the Bell System, I believe even the #4 ESS for toll switching provided for ONI. (I recall in the mid-1970s making toll calls via ONI). The Labs' history describes different techniques for obtaining the caller's number in different switches. It wasn't that easy to do and there were speed/cost tradeoffs.

Originally in panel the toll operator's switchboard had verify test- tips. The operator would tap her cord against a numbered jack and a signal would confirm if that was indeed the subscriber's line. How widespread that feature was utilized or how long it was used I don't know. Of course it required a field of 10,000 test-tips for the whole exchange, which meant toll operators were restricted to a particular exchange only, which wasn't very efficient.

The front of old telephone directories contained three admonishments:

1) Giving a false number for billing purposes was a crime; 2) Failure to give up a party line in case of an emergency was a crime; 3) Recording a call required a beep tone every 15 seconds.

(Of course today the white pages telephone directory is essentially gone. The front today of Yellow Pages would have some featured divorce or personal injury lawyer in blood red bold type "WE WILL GET MONEY FOR YOU". This is supposed to be progress.)

The headline news about toll fraud was 'blue boxes' and the like, but I don't recall much said about the simpler ONI fraud mentioned above. I'm surprised it went on places like Vermont--I would guess it would be more of a problem in big cities.

Perhaps the Bell System 'picked and chose' calls to verify, such as coast-to-coast or overseas calls which were more expensive than calls to the next town. Maybe they randomly selected calls to check.

P.S. I forgot to mention that the same 1960 article reported that NY would start having 2L codes without a word meaning, that is, codes like "TT" or "TF". Also, the subsequent directories would say only PE instead of PEnnsylvania. Anyone know more about NYC going to ANC?

(Comedian Allan King wrote in his 1962 book his criticism of ANC. He didn't like getting an area code 516 and needing to use it.)

However, I believe exchange names hung on in the NYC area until about

1978. Philadelphia was the last to convert to ANC, doing so in 1980. To this day a few businesses and government agencies still list their phone number the old way. Until very recently a major paving company had "DE 3-nnnn" listing on all their trucks. ***** Moderator's Note *****

Some companies use AAn-nnnn phone listings because they feel it conveys an impression that they've been in business for a long time.

Bill Horne Moderator

Interestingly back in the early 1980's the town of North Kingstown, RI was still served by an SxS exchange. But this exchange had some sort of strange ANI setup. If you dialed a call and waited the correct number of kerchunks and flashed the hook, it would bump cause it to route to an ONI operator.

And yes, you'd give her any random number.