[niccl]

There was a deep technical reason for it, too. I suspect I'm one of the very few living people that know what it was., so I'll share it with HN so the knowledge doesn't die :-)

A relatively early type of mechanical telephone exchange was the rotary exchange [0]. The pulses from the phone cause a clutch to connect the rotary driver in the exchange which then moved the switching stuff around (details can probably be inferred from the linked article). One of the issues with the rotary exchange is the pads of the clutch wear, leading to unreliable connections. Aotearoa/NZ had an existing number plan when they decided to install rotary exchanges. Some bright spark knew of the wear issue, and calculated that, given the existing number plan, if they had the 1 position on the dial giving 9 pulses (etc.) then the overall wear on the pads would be much lower and so the maintenance requirement would be less. And that's where it started.

And another fun fact. I believe Norway chose the same configuration for their rotary phones. I'm not sure if it was for the same reason, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_system

[ztetranz]

Thanks for this. I'm a kiwi and wondered why we were different.

When friends started bringing pushbutton / cordless phones across from Australia, I was able to convert them to NZ numbering by reversing a few wires on the keyboard matrix. These generated pulses long before DTMF.

[sephalon]

The driver supports alternate keycode mappings specifically for that reason, but before reading your comment I was unaware of the motivation behind reversing the pulse order. Thanks!