For the genesis of "Press 1...", press 2
1611.18
In 1891, Almon Strowger (never heard of him) patented the rotary dial for the telephone (oh, that guy). He also invented the automatic telephone exchange, eliminating thousands of central office jobs and spawning acres of stepper-relays. COSI used to have a working one in a how-the-telephone-works exhibit. Over the decades Western Electric got very good at making them surprisingly reliable given how violent the mechanism is, but they still sucked. Bell Labs had a long-running research program searching for a replacement technology, building a complete tone-based system in 1941 that it later judged too difficult to mass produce reliably. (When you pushed a button it plucked a tuned string that played into the microphone – what could possibly go wrong...?) ATT Long Lines started using tones in the 50s to control long-distance routing, but at home the dial was the thing.
Cut to today, 1963, the day ATT made available for sale the Touch-Tone phone, with a rectangular keypad where the dial used to was. They premiered it at the 1962 World Expo in NY almost a year earlier to rave reviews. Huge demand, instant success, gigantic money-maker for Ma, and revolutionized man/machine interaction worldwide even though the buttons were upside-down. The players:
Henry Dryfus, an industrial designer working as a consultant to Bell Telephone, is credited with inventing the interface notion of the pushbutton.
John E. Karlin, an industrial psychologist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, was responsible for the research used to develop the rectangular keypad, the shape of its keys and, yes, the position the numbers. So if you’ve ever wondered who was the genius that decided to make the phone keypad upside down compared to a calculator keypad, that would be John.
But the gold stars go to (wait for it) . . . . the ***analog circuit guys*** who worked out the analog circuit to make the tones. Decades of R&D had convinced everyone that there was no way to put tones into a phone without some kind of electronics. Vacuum tubes never were considered seriously because of their reliability, cost, reliability, size, reliability, power, and reliability. Even though Bell Labs had invented the transistor as a reliability upgrade to the tube, after 16 years it still was thought to be too delicate to put into an environment as dangerous as a domestic kitchen. It solved the power and size problems, but robust versions were expensive and a traditional circuit would take 4 per phone. Robust was important, and no one knew more than ATT about the true cost of reliability; when IBM had 40,000 employees, ATT had 40,000 *vehicles*.
At a time when the vast majority of transistor circuit design was actually a transistorization of a classical vacuum tube circuit, Frank Boesch and Harry Heffes had a better idea. Their circuit produced two tones per button, each switchable over a one-octave range, using exactly *one* (*1*) transistor. Frank and Harry created a new oscillator circuit with an elegance that is unmatched to this day. Besides only one active device (that lone transistor buried in a group of protection devices), it had two precision-wound coils (something WE figured out last century) and no calibration or tuning adjustments - 8 frequencies, each within a 1% tolerance, that never drifted and never failed. Original keypads still work today.
ak
1611.18
In 1891, Almon Strowger (never heard of him) patented the rotary dial for the telephone (oh, that guy). He also invented the automatic telephone exchange, eliminating thousands of central office jobs and spawning acres of stepper-relays. COSI used to have a working one in a how-the-telephone-works exhibit. Over the decades Western Electric got very good at making them surprisingly reliable given how violent the mechanism is, but they still sucked. Bell Labs had a long-running research program searching for a replacement technology, building a complete tone-based system in 1941 that it later judged too difficult to mass produce reliably. (When you pushed a button it plucked a tuned string that played into the microphone – what could possibly go wrong...?) ATT Long Lines started using tones in the 50s to control long-distance routing, but at home the dial was the thing.
Cut to today, 1963, the day ATT made available for sale the Touch-Tone phone, with a rectangular keypad where the dial used to was. They premiered it at the 1962 World Expo in NY almost a year earlier to rave reviews. Huge demand, instant success, gigantic money-maker for Ma, and revolutionized man/machine interaction worldwide even though the buttons were upside-down. The players:
Henry Dryfus, an industrial designer working as a consultant to Bell Telephone, is credited with inventing the interface notion of the pushbutton.
John E. Karlin, an industrial psychologist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, was responsible for the research used to develop the rectangular keypad, the shape of its keys and, yes, the position the numbers. So if you’ve ever wondered who was the genius that decided to make the phone keypad upside down compared to a calculator keypad, that would be John.
But the gold stars go to (wait for it) . . . . the ***analog circuit guys*** who worked out the analog circuit to make the tones. Decades of R&D had convinced everyone that there was no way to put tones into a phone without some kind of electronics. Vacuum tubes never were considered seriously because of their reliability, cost, reliability, size, reliability, power, and reliability. Even though Bell Labs had invented the transistor as a reliability upgrade to the tube, after 16 years it still was thought to be too delicate to put into an environment as dangerous as a domestic kitchen. It solved the power and size problems, but robust versions were expensive and a traditional circuit would take 4 per phone. Robust was important, and no one knew more than ATT about the true cost of reliability; when IBM had 40,000 employees, ATT had 40,000 *vehicles*.
At a time when the vast majority of transistor circuit design was actually a transistorization of a classical vacuum tube circuit, Frank Boesch and Harry Heffes had a better idea. Their circuit produced two tones per button, each switchable over a one-octave range, using exactly *one* (*1*) transistor. Frank and Harry created a new oscillator circuit with an elegance that is unmatched to this day. Besides only one active device (that lone transistor buried in a group of protection devices), it had two precision-wound coils (something WE figured out last century) and no calibration or tuning adjustments - 8 frequencies, each within a 1% tolerance, that never drifted and never failed. Original keypads still work today.
ak
