Insider
Senior Member
The push-button telephone that is about to enter service has
demanded a completely new technology that may one day turn
it into a domestic computer terminal.
Looking exactly like a conventional instrument, except for its 10-button keypad in place of the rotary
dial, it is being sold to the public as “the phone with the modern touch”. And while it will set up a
call no quicker than a conventional dial, because of the drawbacks of electromechanical telephone
exchanges, the keypad will allow the number to be entered much more quickly (typically 5 seconds
for a10-digit number, compared with 14 seconds using a disc dial).
What the public is not yet aware of is the mind-boggling revolution in telephone development it
has started. By the end of the decade, the button dial will be ideally suited to the high-speed
switching that the new generation of electronic telephone exchanges will make available, and quite
a different type of telephone signalling technique will have begun to enter public service. Known as
multi-frequency (MF), this also offers the first chance to use the ordinary telephone as a datainput
service. Then the possibilities for entirely new subscriber services are almost endless.
The ultimate would be a full teletype system with a visual display unit that could adopt the
full alphanumeric keyboard of a typewriter. Linked to an MF telephone this could be used not
only to key in complicated statements to a computerised database, but also to send letters
over the telephone lines at up to 15 characters per second.
From New Scientist
demanded a completely new technology that may one day turn
it into a domestic computer terminal.
Looking exactly like a conventional instrument, except for its 10-button keypad in place of the rotary
dial, it is being sold to the public as “the phone with the modern touch”. And while it will set up a
call no quicker than a conventional dial, because of the drawbacks of electromechanical telephone
exchanges, the keypad will allow the number to be entered much more quickly (typically 5 seconds
for a10-digit number, compared with 14 seconds using a disc dial).
What the public is not yet aware of is the mind-boggling revolution in telephone development it
has started. By the end of the decade, the button dial will be ideally suited to the high-speed
switching that the new generation of electronic telephone exchanges will make available, and quite
a different type of telephone signalling technique will have begun to enter public service. Known as
multi-frequency (MF), this also offers the first chance to use the ordinary telephone as a datainput
service. Then the possibilities for entirely new subscriber services are almost endless.
The ultimate would be a full teletype system with a visual display unit that could adopt the
full alphanumeric keyboard of a typewriter. Linked to an MF telephone this could be used not
only to key in complicated statements to a computerised database, but also to send letters
over the telephone lines at up to 15 characters per second.
From New Scientist
