WEBSITE: BROADCASTING TV YEARBOOK 1957-1958

[Hal Erickson]

I'm old enough to remember when, to avoid accidentally using actual phone numbers, TV show writers dreamed up such exchanges as "QUincy" and "ZEnith" (there being no Q or Z on the dial, of course).

 

[KeithE4]

I'm old enough to remember when, to avoid accidentally using actual phone numbers, TV show writers dreamed up such exchanges as "QUincy" and "ZEnith" (there being no Q or Z on the dial, of course).

Not in years past, but nowadays, what with dial-by-name functions in modern office phone systems, many phones show 7 as being "PQRS" and 9 being "WXYZ."

If you owned a business named Zenith Carpets, and you advertised your number as being ZENITH-1, it would be dialed as 936-4841.

 

[fybush]

ZEnith was actually used by some telcos for an early version of toll-free calling - before the days of 800 numbers, you could dial the operator and ask for "ZEnith XXXX" and be connected to a business, usually somewhere outside the local calling area, that was willing to pay for that privilege. You couldn't direct-dial those numbers. In some areas, these were "Enterprise" numbers. I think "Zenith" may also have been used for early mobile phones...and in fact, maybe that's all that "Zenith" was, while it was "Enterprise" that was toll-free.

 

[KeithE4]

ZEnith was actually used by some telcos for an early version of toll-free calling - before the days of 800 numbers, you could dial the operator and ask for "ZEnith XXXX" and be connected to a business, usually somewhere outside the local calling area, that was willing to pay for that privilege. You couldn't direct-dial those numbers. In some areas, these were "Enterprise" numbers. I think "Zenith" may also have been used for early mobile phones...and in fact, maybe that's all that "Zenith" was, while it was "Enterprise" that was toll-free.

I remember the Zenith and Enterprise numbers, and I believe they were both toll-free to the caller.

Mobile (pre-cellular) phones had a 57x or 95x prefix from what I remember, since no names could be made out of those prefixes.

 

[fybush]

I suspect it differed by telco. I grew up in Rochester Telephone territory, so things were always a bit different here from the way they were handled in Bell areas. Directory assistance here was "113" well into the 1970s, for instance.