Historically, I understand that the landline telephone system of
> Europe was never as developed as that of the U.S. Telephone service
With the exception of France which had incorporated digital directory service into their phone system in the 1980's. Even in the early 90's when I lived there the French phone system had some real advantages over the US and others. True, getting a new phone line could be difficult and slow, but the functionality was better than anything in the rest of the world once you got a connection. Some of the phones could even act as a 24X80 terminal connecting to a dial-up service. The limitation was mostly screen size. The basic phones only had a few lines of text available, but even the most basic phones had it.
Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.