Techno fear is not a myth - getting to grips with new technology can be a struggle. Many highly intelligent people have difficulty programming a video recorder - because their logic is more advanced than a machine's.
Using a normal telephone or fax seems straightforward enough but many people are less confident when it comes to unravelling the mysteries of stored contact lists, text messaging and other functions on highly featured mobiles.
Through the history of telecommunications, from the telegraph onwards, design has focused on making the machine easy to use.
The Baudot system was potentially fast, using multiplexing and code groups - but the original keyboard was very difficult to use.
There were five 'piano' keys, worked with two fingers of the left hand and three of the right. The keys were pressed down in varying combinations that represented a character in 'Baudot 5-unit code'
Operating this system required a lot of skill - the operator had to keep up a steady unvarying rhythm of about 150 letters per minute.
Eventually the system was replaced by new 5-unit systems.
In the early days of the telephone there was no need for a dial at all. Picking up the telephone connected you direct to the operator, who then connected you through to the number you asked for.
Later, automatic exchanges used electro-mechanical switching systems. Your telephone needed to send a series of electrical pulses to the exchange to tell it the number you wished to call, and the technical solution was the rotary dial.
When you dial a number and let go, a spring rotates the dial back to its original position. As each number is dialled, the mechanism sends that exact number of electrical signals to the exchange.
The signals sent are often referred to as 'pulses', but they are actually 'breaks'. In other words the dial switches off and on a steady electric current flowing in the line from the exchange. As this happens, the exchange senses the current stopping and starting, and decodes the digit dialled - one 'break' for 1, two 'breaks' for 2, and so on up to ten 'breaks', sent by dialling the digit '0'.
The Dial of Destiny was the rather grandiose title given to what was basically an executive gift.
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Electromechanical switching systems such as Strowger worked by routing calls step-by-step through a sequence of electrical switches, all the way to the number being called. For what are known as 'own exchange' calls, all this happens with a single telephone exchange, but most calls need connecting through to other exchanges, and many pass through intermediate exchange along the way.
From the late 1920s onwards, Britain's major cities needed seven-digit numbers, consisting of three digits to identify the exchange frequired, ollowed by four digits to identify the individual telephone line on that exchange.
But these long numbers were thought to be too difficult to remember, so the number was 'repackaged' in a mixed form with the exchange digits element as the first three letters of the exchange name. So, for example, the number 1234 on London's 'Arnold' exchange was quoted as ARNold 1234.
This greatly improved user convenience, even though it did mean having to include the letters in the dials.
The very first automatic telephone systems made by Almon Strowger used a trio of push buttons to signal numbers being called. This was fine when telephone numbers had only three digits, but the telephone dial was a more convenient way to send longer numbers.
By 1912, the dial had become the standard way of operating mechanical switching, and was fitted to most of the different systems tried by the GPO, including Strowger, Relay Automatic, and Rotary systems.
The significant exception was the Lorimer system developed, installed in Hereford in 1914. From Canada, Lorimer telephones used four levers to set the numbers and a crank handle to send these digits once the levers had been set.
The method was supposed to be less prone to dialling errors - but that wasn't much of a problem in any case. In every other respect the Lorimer system was too limited and complicated to succeed. It was also not exactly confidence building - you could be happily chatting to someone only to find yourself connected to another number halfway through the call!
From around 1970 push button phones made dialling numbers far easier. That was because the dialling process was much shorter - punching out a sequence of numbers rather than having to turn the dial and let it spin back so many times.
Mechanically, though, the process was hardly any quicker - because each button push was actually generating a series of pulses to go down the phone line, no faster than those produced by a rotary dial.
It required the introduction of electronic exchanges from the mid 1970s onwards to recognise tone dialling - each button generating a different pair of musical tones.
This was faster, more accurate - and compatible with other electronic equipment. From here onwards, it became possible for machines and systems to do your dialling for you.
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People sometimes wonder why telephones and calculator keypads have different number layouts. The reason is quite logical - they were developed for different purposes. The calculator keyboard is a carry-over from the old adding machines used by trained operators, where the layout was designed to minimise the operators' finger movements, with the lower (more frequently used) keys and zero within easier reach than the higher numbers. The keyboard also follows mathematical convention, with a numbering range from 0 (zero) to 9.
When push button telephones were introduced most people had never seen, let alone used, a calculator, meaning that the keypad layout could be optimised for telephone users. So today's keypad layout is the result of comprehensive testing for the human factors involved, carried out by the Post Office in the 1960s and 1970s.
Keypad telephones offered a quicker and simpler way to make a call but, when the telephones were being developed, no one was sure what the best layout for the buttons would be.
The dial telephone had been around for decades and the slow speed of dialling, with callers forced to wait for the dial piece to spin back to rest between every number was a hindrance to the increasingly long numbers being dialled. The keypad offered many benefits, but it needed to fit inside the space previously occupied by the dial.
These telephones show four different trial layouts. They were used in intensive laboratory and user tests and, if you want to know the results, just look at the layout on your telephone now.
Just as on the dial, the digits run from 1 to 0, unlike the numbers on computers and calculators, which run from 0 to 9 - the other way around - for different reasons.
Alf Sawkins is a 56 year-old engineer who grew up in the centre of Birmingham. He married at the age of 23 and moved to the outskirts of the city, which is when he had his first telephone at home.
Telecommunications has altered his life and his work in a variety of ways since that first phone was installed.
He explains how he tried to use a phone for the first time with a group of friends to confirm a booking for his local football team, with disastrous results.
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