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Comment by comstock | Hacker News Reader

Well the Wikipedia article on the subject is very instructive:

"The 9-9-9 format was chosen based on the 'button A' and 'button B' design of pre-payment coin-operated public payphones in wide use (first introduced in 1925) which could be easily modified to allow free use of the 9 digit on the rotary dial in addition to the 0 digit (then used to call the operator)"

So there were valid technical reasons, as well as 999 being harder to dial by accident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/999_(emergency_telephone_num...

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> So there were valid technical reasons

Valid technical reasons and crappy design are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, but here it's hardly reasonable to describe the choice of numbers as "crappy design". It's a rational choice: a number that is easy to remember, and accidental calls don't happen too easily, making the service better available for actual emergencies.

Britain still talks of 999 only, even if 112 works just the same - today, as extremely few phones use decadic dialing any more, a number that would be represented by just four on-hook pulses is no longer any more of a problem from the point of accidentally dialing it.

Having to call 999 this week. I did not think 112 or 911 would work. Its the adrenalin that kicks in and 999 is just engrained to us in the UK.

I don't think your reply follows logically.

What I said originally was that 999 is a bad choice as it takes considerably more time to dial.

The reply was that there were technical reasons for using 999, for which I replied that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Did you mean to reply to my original post maybe?

"What I said originally was that 999 is a bad choice as it takes considerably more time to dial."

You are probably not old enough to know why you use the word "dial" when you refer to pressing keys.

999 looks wrong on any phone and hence elicits a response, 112 looks like yet another extension. The only reason you associate 112 with emergency services is because that is what you have learned from an early age.

I'll assert that 999 is a far better number for an emergency - it does not look anything like any other number that you would want to dial unless you have a real problem.

> You are probably not old enough to know why you use the word "dial" when you refer to pressing keys.

Actually it's the opposite. You sound like one who has never tried to "dial" 999 on a rotary dial when seconds are the difference between life and death. 999 in that moment feels like an awful choice.

We are taking about emergency and as such the most important thing is time and not the rest of the reasons you mentioned.

Time is not the most important thing. Dialing the correct number is more important.

I would say 999 is still the better choice as it is always the last stop on a rotary. I can imagine if they had it as 111, for example, a lot of people would be redialing from panicking and accidentally dialling too far.

> I would say 999 is still the better choice as it is always the last stop on a rotary.

No, zero is. (It would not be possible to flash the line zero times, so a zero is dialed with ten flashes.)

In NZ 111 is the number and worked fine - but then that's because the the exchange switches and dials were set up backwards to the British ones (rumoured to be by mistake!)

What do you mean “dialing too far”? Choosing the wrong hole in insert your finger into?

I can see that happening if someone is panicking, especially an older person.

> Valid technical reasons and crappy design are not mutually exclusive.

'Valid', in this context, means that they do in fact at least diminish the arguments against the chosen solution. If you want to argue that the specific reasons given by others here do not trump your preferred solution, you should make that specific argument, instead of falling back on generalities, especially when they are not so general.

Maybe I should have quoted the "So there were valid technical reasons".

That sentence was what I was replying to.

It is not a generality. I am just stating that having valid technical reasons doesn't mean it cannot be crappy design.

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