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by kalleboo 3280 days ago
An example of the drawbacks of decentralization - meanwhile in Sweden, 98% of phones were already covered by the "90 000" emergency number by 1965.
2 comments

Wow, that must've taken forever to dial on a rotary phone.
On Swedish rotary phones the 0 was on the other side (one pulse)
What?! What happened when you made an international call, did you have to subtract 1 from all the digits?
In 1965 there wasn't much international direct dialling yet; mainly to neighbouring countries. The rest was done via an operator. International exchanges tended to buffer the entire called phone number anyway, even back in electromechanical times, which meant they could also translate the pulses if that would have been necessary.
0 indexed! :)
Still better than 0118 999 881 999 119 7253

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ

And better than a cell phone, where dialing 911 results in the phone locking, then crashing.

I've actually had this happen in an emergency. I can't tell you how dismayed I was that my phone crashed when I called 911.

goodness, what a thought ><. Not too far back we called 911 on a cell phone that we didn't know had the microphone shorted when it had gotten wet earlier in the day but otherwise was completely operational. Took several minutes to figure out what was going on. I think we wound up texting a friend that we'd call them and to verify they could hear us or not. We wound up having a headset handy luckily enough.
were you running cyanogenmod? i remember one version of that ROM having e911 issues
No. It was a basically stock Verizon edition of Android.

After that experience I switched to iPhone. However, since then, I've experienced the iPhone iCloud Phone.app crash, which also denied me 911 service (although fortunately I noticed the problem and resolved it before needing 911.)

Sometimes I have a hard time watching IT Crowd because I see too much of myself/my coworkers in the characters.
Don't we have the same issue in software today..

Many projects have their own snowflake build systems, web APIs have custom authentication schemes, multiple federated login systems...

Don't get me wrong we see a lot of consolidation, the world is getting better :)