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#1: Mark Conger (aruba) on Aug 1, 2005

I sense a connection to the last puzzle...

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So am I. Where does the term come from?

rotary

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That story suggests that either I'm extremely old, or you are STILL young. I prefer the latter explanation.

You can't be very old Jan..because I refuse to go there!

Jan im 26 so the latter ones right

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there are 26 area codes in California

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There phones similar to this, but the dial was under the phone, very complex.
Good puzzle, nice comments.

Anyone in the UK remember when we used to have 'local' codes as well as STD codes (STD= Standard Trunk Dialling)

Love the end picture for this puzzle, very evocative.

Ditto #1

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I've never heard of any geographical connection to the phone number names. When I was a kid, my phone number was "Normandy 28287", but there was nothing Normandyish about Ann Arbor. I always assumed the names were random.

I'll bet if you do some research Jan, that you'd find that there was some Normandy connection to the area you lived in...

Ok, just did a quick google... There is a Normandy Street in Ann Arbor... could be as simple as that.

A little one block long residential street in the southwest corner of the town and they named the exchange for the whole city after it? I'm not sure, but I think that neighborhood is actually newer than the exchange name.

There seems to be a somewhat broken and poorly designed website that collects historical exchange names from old phone books and such. http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html

Apparently exchange names were originally chosen by local phone companies according to local systems, and many of them originally made geographical sense. The Bell system eventually came up with a list of recommended names which is here: http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Recommended.html it's likely that other places just picked names off the list, regardless of geography. UnderHill and Normandy are both on that list.

We also had a prefix of NV in San Francisco which everyone understood to mean Noe (pronouced no-e) Valley, also a neighborhood in the city. It was a little Southwest of Underhill. I could be wrong about where the prefixes came from. I was less than 10 years old and that's the way it was explained to me at the time.

I'm pretty sure from all I've read that San Francisco had geographically meaningful names. But in many places the names were randomly assigned from the Bell system's list.

When I was a kid, the entirely city of Ann Arbor was on one prefix. (I have the vague impression that you didn't even have to dial the prefix, but I wasn't making a lot of phone calls at the time.) So given that the AA prefix wasn't available, what kind of geographically meaningful name were they going to assign to the whole city? They didn't bother. It was all Normandy.

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