Dear Mr. Professor, the Exalted One, Pat Townson:
> In the mid 90s I was an active reader of the Digest and my association
> still shows in many Google searches [I worked for Digital Equipment at
> the time]. VAXclusters with food nodes SNAX etc.
> On of the Portland radio folk today mentioned the early 90s and 900
> numbers in his show today. His claim was some television advertisers
> would encourage you to hold the handset to the phone and the broadcast
> the tones and actually dial the 900 number.
> Do I just not remember this or was it never real? I check SNOPES and
> didn't see a reference. Telcomm has so many references, thankfully. I
> figured I'd go to the Master!
> Howard Pierpont
> Retired DEC/Intel
> Hillsboro OR
I remember that the ad would come on TV, and at the end of the ad it would tell the audience to hold their phones up to the TV and the DTMF tones would be played and the call would be completed. But darned if I can remember what it was for. At some point I think it was for a children's product and it got rapidly banned since it was a long distance (or maybe a 900 call) and how were children supposed to understand that. I also vaguely remember it for one of those adult chat lines ads that came on during the late, late movie. I would suspect that this is somewhere in the archives, but the search could be fairly daunting.
Happy Solstice.