Friday 30 June 2017

hug of death

In a brilliant encore to the outlet’s most popular post from a year ago on telephone number trivia and other artefacts of the exchanges, Tedium expounds on more weirdness—for American audiences, to be found be found on the line. Ranging from the history behind automated services, like dialling a number to get the time and temperature (which people could not get enough of and often broke the switchboards), familiar operator voices, to unusual numbers to call (mostly the antecedents for humourous 404 landing pages) and how one used to request web pages by facsimile, the article covers a lot of ground and offers a lot of avenues for further investigation and entertainment.