Has MIT changed its zipcode? I had 02139 burned into ram, back when we wrote physical letters. The literal phone number thing appeared in Reader's Digest when I was a kid: Seven digit phone numbers used to be two letters and five digits, with a mnemonic for the two letters. Often the mnemonic would also have the third letter match the lead digit: My phone number at one time was Whitehall 3-1293, and nearby folks had a Whitehall 4 prefix. The phone company introduced all-digit phone numbers around the same time as they brought in area codes for user-dialed long distance. A lot of people were unhappy losing the alpha mnemonics, and the RD suggested harassing operators with "could I please have three billion, one hundred twenty nine million, four hundred thirty one thousand, two hundred ninety three?" I recall hearing about new slang including "gnurd" in 1964, second hand, perhaps from the Johnny Carson TV show. I though it was a Brit import. There were several other (at the time) derogatory terms, maybe including "geek". Rich ------------ Quoting James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com>:
And they went to MIT. Case closed.
Jim
On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Michael Kleber <michael.kleber@gmail.com> wrote:
The Car Talk guys would regularly give out the show's phone number broken in unconventional places, i.e. "Call us at 1-888-CAR-TALK, that's eighteen, eight-eight, twenty-two, seventy-eight, two-fifty-five" or "one-triple-8-double-2-single-7-8-2-double-5"
--Michael
On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 9:07 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Every real nerd knows that a number with a zero in the front must be in octal, so your number is bogus.
Real nerds will never agree with "Newer languages have been abandoning the prefix 0, as decimal numbers are often represented with leading zeroes"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octal
At 05:12 PM 3/10/2015, James Propp wrote:
Or "My zip code at MIT is two thousand one hundred and twenty nine ... with a zero in the front."
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