Granted, the “nickel and diming” of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today’s cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money
Here’s a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/
PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?
You just press the number that has the letter, regardless of if the letter was in the beginning or the end, you just press the number wherever that letter is.
Fun fact, it’s a carryover from when dial service was first implemented in the United States!
In the beginning, you’d pick up the phone and hear “Number please?” and then you’d tell the operator the central office name followed by the number, like “Bubbling Brook 3-2468” or “Murray Hill 5-9975”
Once dial service was implemented, you’d instead hear the dial tone and then dial the first two letters of the office name, followed by the rest of the number (BU32468 or MU59975), using this arrangement of letters.
Once phone numbers went to all-digits around 1961, the letters on the dial got repurposed for numbers like these. Of course, they got repurposed again for T9 texting and contact search.
And if it’s longer than 11 digits, just stop.
1-900-737-ATARI
1-900-737-ATAR
Your phones don’t have letters on the buttons?
Long ago, before cell phones blew up how many numbers people used, American seven digit numbers were often referred to as a combination of letters and numbers. Below was a guide I how to translate the first three letters to a single word for numbers in Chicago
When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?
That kind of thing was never used in Brazil, though part of that could be explained by telephones being state controlled up until 1990 or so, people could wait years to get a line.
When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?
You got it!
I’ll go to the magazine isle of Walmart with a pen and paper like a normal person, thank you very much.
These ads were in every gaming magazine I read back in the day. EGM, GamePro, Nintendo Power, etc.
My friends and I never called any of them even once due to fear of parents+phonebill. We all understood that at a very young age, ha.
I even had one rich kid friend, he never called these lines even.
Wait, some countries didn’t have letters on their dialpads? Maybe this was just a thing in English speaking countries?
The only time I called a number similar was the one on the bottom of my NES or SNES to ask about a connector and what it was for… The guy said it was like a trailer hitch in case they wanted to make something to connect to it. To my country boy self, that made sense. I don’t know if they ever used it.
That was there for a CD-ROM add-on, which was planned from the start but never actually released. Nintendo was working on it as a collaboration with both Phillips and Sony. After it got canned, both Phillips and Sony still had rights to some of the technology as part of the collaboration. So Phillips decided to release their own gaming system based upon what they had, and that was the (largely forgotten) CD-i system. And of course Sony did the exact same thing, and that became the Playstation. The rest is history.
