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Comment by matthiasl | Hacker News Reader

Author here.

Yep, 44 is the UK country code. The problem I got stuck on is that the rest of the number, 1831, didn't make sense. I assumed the number was complete, since it had the right start and stop signalling (KP1/KF).

It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020. The UK numbering plan has changed several times since 1980, but I couldn't find a time between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number.

Later on (in the addendum), it turns out that others took a look at the signal in the time domain and spotted a splice, i.e. digits are chopped out of the middle of the number, so the area code probably isn't there at all. It could be that the area code starts with 1, and then the phone number ends with 831.

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A London number at the time would be from the UK (01) eee nnnn where e is the exchange[1] and n is just a number, and the 01 can be omitted if you're in the 01 area. For intentional calls it would be (+44) 1 eee nnnn, as you omit the initial 0 that on an internal UK call is an indication you're dialling an STD[2] number and not a local number. There doesn't seem to have been an 831 exchange at the time[3], so as noted in the article the cut to shorten the number is presumably somewhere in the middle.

In 1990 London was split into 071 (central) and 081 (areas), which meant in 1995 all landlines could have an 01 prefix, so London because 0171 and 0181 (and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle, although I think the Going Live one was better anyway) and finally in 2000 London became 020, with the 7/8 moving to the first digit of the local number (not that the split between local and area codes really matters anymore).

[1] Of course, in ye olden days before all this newfangled "dialling" you'd ask the operator for something like "WHItehall 1212", not 944 1212 (or later 930 1212).

[2] Subscriber Trunk Dialling.

[3] https://rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php has a list, although it seems to be based on a 1968 publication.

> you'd ask the operator for something like "WHItehall 1212"

I still remember my mom making me memorize our phone number when I was very young, "SPring 9 0273". It wasn't very long afterward that everybody switched to all number dialing though.

In the early 80s I knew two phone numbers - 999 for the police, 555 for home.

The exchange was in a tiny hamlet a few miles away.

Show me… subscriber trunk dialing. I must know everything.

> and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle

I thought I was the only one that had that number burned into my memory for all time!

I’m glad, for my sake at least, to hear I’m not the only one.

0181 811 8181 Edit: Thinking about it I think was was Going Lives number?

Nar it was Live and Kicking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmNPyQ-OOp0

But it’s easy to muddle the two shows given the time that’s passed and similarities between the two.

Going Live was before PhONE Day, so it was 081 811 8181 back then. Live and Kicking stuck with the same number when it took over, with it gaining the extra digit fairly early in the run.

Hiya, I see that you updated your blog in regards to this previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285

It references a Telephone World article called ''Pink Floyd's Young Lust – explained and demystified'' with great analysis of the sequences heard.

The discussion is new to me.

I started analysing the audio because someone sent me a link to the film (The Wall) on youtube and asked me about the signalling. Once I'd decoded the telephone number, I tried googling it, to see if someone else had already figured out what it was (a US local number? the number to a US operator? the number a US operator called to talk to a UK operator? the number a UK operator dialled to get a London number?), but nothing came up. There's quite a bit of good discussion about that in the comments here.

A week or two later, I tried googling 'Pink Floyd Telephone Call', and found that the audio actually comes from the album, i.e. it's not just in the film, and a bit more information about how it was made, and put that in the addendum.

> It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020.

I used to work with telephony until 2011. While I worked in Sweden, I am sure this applies for UK, too.

There is no standard in phone number lengths, you can have all sorts of prefixed series, so for example if the area code is "1", then the number 0 could be routed to a destination.

So 04410 is theoretically valid.

Back then we even had 3-digit short form numbers (like 911) that we had to specifically deal with each phone operator for keeping.

It was used for pricey phone dating.

Except in the US, and a handful of other countries who do have fixed length numbering plans.

Was it always like that? The record was released in 1982.

I know in my part of the world we went from 2-digit local numbers to 3-4-5 digits, to 8 or 10 digits over a century.

My point being this is simply routing implementation details. Even USA has 911 for example.

I looked at a London telephone book from 1979, when I think the record was released.

Most of the phone numbers were something like 01 361 1234, i.e. seven digits after the 01 area code. The _361_ part was bold, so I think that was an exchange number.

A few numbers were something like "Placename 12345". Wikipedia explains why that was.

> I couldn't find a time between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number.

What about when outer London numbers started 081? Dialed from another country with the 00 international call prefix the number if could be a fragment starting from the second digit (i.e. 0044 1831xxxx)?

the change form 01 was a big deal, and BT ran some very amusing ads playing on snobbishness about where in London one lived.

I remember London area codes being 01 (or 0441 from USA) followed by 6 digits, so maybe 3 are missing. It would be interesting to see if that landline is still available, but with 1000 possibilities (01ABC831) maybe a google search might be the way to go.

Interesting.

Normally, films use deliberately fictious numbers, e.g. in the US it's always xxx555xxxxxx. Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1. The Pink Floyd number is a bit unusual---it's not made up.

According to a previous analysis, the call was the album's "Chief Engineer James Guthrie who called his own London apartment", with a neighbour answering the phone. Someone probably knows roughly where James Guthrie lived in 1979/1980 and what the area code there was. But I don't.

Okay. If the call was from within the UK then I think the 0441 code would have been Swansea, but that would have required 3 numbers being cut from the middle.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)#Fiction..., the officially reserved block under the NANP has shrunk to XXX-555-01XX, but outside of XXX-555-1212 (directory assistance), and toll-free 800-555-XXXX there is little use of the range.

There are some hits in this old phonebook [1], but one needs to pay to view the records. Maybe some one else can do this.

[1] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1025/?name=Jam...

> Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1.

Ofcom has set aside blocks of numbers within many different area codes for dramatic use[1]. The note on Wikipedia about 011x and 01x1 is that the reserved numbers in those (real) area codes usually end with 496 0xxx (so, for instance, 0114 496 0000 to 0114 496 0999 are reserved numbers in the Sheffield/0114 area - other 0114 numbers may be allocated to real customers).

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...

Somebody could contact James Guthrie since he's still alive and probably has his old apartment phone number written down somewhere (if not still memorized).

This is correct.

In the 90's I recall London area prefix changed from 01 to first 071 (central) and 081 (greater) and then 0171 and 0181. Later still, those codes became 0207 and 0208.

I still notice old shop signs up with the old prefixes.

All UK internal phone numbers start with a zero. However when you dial the UK from abroad, you omit the leading zero, so the UK version of the number in question would be 01831, which sounds a lot like an area code (though apparently is not one in current use)

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