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On Tue, 3 Apr 2012 12:46:09 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

On Apr 3, 5:30*pm, wrote:
On Apr 3, 9:25*am, Stephen Furley wrote:

Ok, so when cell phones came out widely, did Britain convert to that
scheme? *What about older landline Touch Tone and rotary phones--did
the dial ring have to be converted?
Sorry, I don't understand this; what does the introduction of cell
phones have to do with letters/numbers, and converting other 'phones?

The letter/number matchup on US dials/keypads has been the same since
letters were introduced in the 1920s.

I understand that historically Britain used a different matchup.
Thus, when cellphones came out with the US matchup, there was some
sort of 'conversion' between historical British practice and modern
units. *That's what I'm trying to put into perspective.

I see what you're saying now. The fact that the Mitel IP 'phone
conforms to the same standard as cell 'phones suggests that this is
standard on all new 'phones. There was a considerable period when new
British 'phones didn't have letters at all, from the introduction of
all-figure dialing around the late '60s, until well into the push-
button era. Most of the button 'phones in my collection are 10 button
LD (pulse) models and most if not all of these lack letters, I don't
have all of them to hand to check. Many later 12 button DTMF or dual
signalling models also lack letters. Later, letters were re-
introduced, in the same pattern as on cell 'phones, which enabled
things like the TAXICAB example, but this is much less common here
than in the US. Because there was a long gap between the phasing out
of exchange names in numbers, such as ABBey 1234 and the use of
letters for other purposes the minor changes to the positions of a
couple of letters didn't really cause confusion. Most of the last
'phones to have letters on, or around, the dial would have been out of
use years before the re-introduction of letters to a slightly
different pattern, in fairly recent times.

Nobody seems to have mentioned New Zeeland, where the 0 is in the same
place, but the other digits run clockwise round the dial, so the 5 is
also in the same place, but all of the other digits are different.
The mechanism is the same as on a normal dial, so that dialing a digit
n generates 10-n pulses.

Yeah, I tried to explain that to a technician at then BC Tel in
Vancouver at the time when Teleglobe Canada introduced international
direct dialling (mid-70's?). He had a hard time getting his mind
around that anomaly. NZ's emergency number is 111, rather than 999.

Rotary phones had no letters on the face plate, but push buttons did
when introduced.

snipped

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