TELECOM Re: Telephones and dorm rooms

For college kids of that era, plenty still used the traditional mail
> to communicate with parents, old friends, lovers, etc since long > distance charges, while dropping, were still expensive. When Bell > came out with big discounts for direct dialed calls after 11 pm, > college kids used it since they were often up at odd hours (of course > some roommates

I believe it was in the early 1960s that the University of Oklahoma put in a centrex (Bell, of course, in those days) with a phone in each dorm room. Almost immediately there were complaints that the system was way overloaded and "no one" could get dial tone from dorm rooms. The telco busy studies all showed no problems. Finally someone got the idea of extending the busy hour studies beyond the usual 10 p.m. When they went to 11 p.m., traffic was up sharply. They continued to extend the studies and finally found the busy hour was between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Wes Leatherocl snipped-for-privacy@aol.com (mailto: snipped-for-privacy@aol.com) snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (mailto: snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com)

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