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?
The 90s equivalent to “Pay 5 gems to continue”.
I wouldnt call this nickle and diming.
I would call this a desperate life line in a world before the internet.
I spent a week smashing my head against a problem in a SNES game before giving up and calling the Nintendo Hotline. Which gave me the the solution to my problem, and did it relatively quickly and without much wasted time… Which I found amazing, and always wondered how they had that information in the era before Gamefaqs.
The Nintendo Hotline was fantastic for me, because I lived close enough to Nintendo’s US offices that the number wasn’t long distance… and it wasn’t a 900 number, so it never cost more than a regular phone call. I got all the hints I needed for free.
Which I found amazing, and always wondered how they had that information in the era before Gamefaqs.
What game was that, by the way? Because I immediately think every hotline worked the same: company makes one or two parts stupidly difficult to get through just so a few will end up calling. Sierra On-line’s adventure games were notorious for their pants-on-head logic and hidden shit.
StarTropics for NES had a “letter from your uncle” in the manual, that you had to soak in water to reveal the submarine’s activation code when you reached Chapter 4. I think that was the only time we used the Nintendo tip line, because of a lost manual!
This isn’t even the game company doing it here. Man 900 numbers, what a throwback.
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.
That’s a more modern version. Q and Z were originally left off, which lets the numbers 2 through 9 have only three letters each. You wouldn’t find mnemonic numbers listed with those letters. Which was fine, because they aren’t common letters in English, anyway.
They got added when cell phone text messaging got big on flip phones. Then you had to have them.
If you want to see a monkey, just call 555-123 SOO.
Damn. That’s a great piece of info. I didn’t know about this stuff until I moved to the US. lol. Thank you for the education of course.
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 the “DRM” of the day was typing in the third word of the second paragraph on page 6 of the printed booklet that came with the game.
Some games let you keep playing without the correct code… until the difficulty automatically ramped up to impossible levels.
And if it’s longer than 11 digits, just stop.
1-900-737-ATARI
1-900-737-ATAR
I’ll go to the magazine isle of Walmart with a pen and paper like a normal person, thank you very much.
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!
Yes, it would be 8477. It wasn’t uncommon to see the number only version beside or below the word version. They are mostly there to make it easier to remember the phone number, since having a list of contacts wasn’t nearly as common back then, at least as a kid.
Yes, 8477. And back when SMS text messaging was a new feature on cellphones, the earliest way to enter the letters was to hit the number multiple times until the right letter was on screen. So to write “cat” you would hit 222 2 8. This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.
This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.
That’s brave to print that on Lemmy in times of LLMs, I give you that. It’s 20 years late too argue about that, but I do miss convenience of reliably printing whole paragraphs without even looking.
I mean I think it was basically a dictionary lookup, nothing like the negatives we see with today’s LLMs
Yup. But that assistance in retrospect feels like the first time we encountered something alike. It prints faster for you but it needs a constant supervision, so you end up glued to the screen, fixing the results. I recall printing a long word with t9, and it followed me for 6 letters, but completely changed the word at the 7th letter to something else entirely, because it’s dictionary didn’t have my word in it, or it thought it’s not as popular. Less control, more attention, frequent fuck ups. It’s close in UX to what I personally getting now.
One of the reasons I was always confused was because of that, with old cell phones, typing “S” for an SMS would be the equivalent of 7777. With that logic, TIPS would become 8 444 7 7777, a whole ass phone number in length
It’s kind of like mixing apples and oranges.
North American phone numbers are longer than in other places because other places have a country code, while a lot of NA uses a single code, +1.
This causes the problem of having to fit all those numbers under said code. Which makes the numhers themselves longer.
In the days before smartphones, people had to carry a notebook with numbers or just remeber them, so someone at Bell Labs git the idea to print letters on the number pad of phones.
What this does is make it easier to remember - for example, instead of remembering to dial 18002274846466 you dial 1800ACTIVISION.
For this you’d just press the key with the letter on it once. The phone line doesn’t use numbers or letters, but electrical signals. These signals correspond to the button pressed. So instead of calling it the “Top left button”, etc. it was labeled as “1”. Then ABC was added, but the idea was the same - you press the button with the right number/letter on it.
Similarily, if you formst a number with spaces and dashes - you don’t dial those. They’re likewise merely a tool to aid memorizing information.
SMS was a newer invention. You had these number pads with 12 buttons, labeled with numbers and letters. However, now you wanted to actually differentiate the different letters from numbers and from each other. You could just press the number once, but then the person on the other end would need to decode that "439” is “HEY” and not, say “IDY”. The simplest way was to make it so you’d need to press the button multiple times.
In essence, people first came up with the idea to add letters to phone keys to aid in memorizing numbers - however, it was still the number you dialed, not an alphanumeric code. Only later did the need to be able to specify a letter come. You use the newer convention for texting, and the older one for calling.
Just as an addendum, the letters predate touch tone phones by a lot. They were originally used for the central office prefix, which in a lot of smaller places was also just the town name. If you were within the town you could just use the 4- (or later 5-) digit phone number of the person you were calling, but if you wanted to call the next town over you would need to dial the 2 numbers corresponding to the letters or tell the operator the name and number, like “Lakewood 2697”. That’s my understanding, anyway, from talking to people who lived in that time or seeing it in movies.
Yup. You press the same number as many times as you need. If the whole word is under 5 then the number is all 5s. lol. I’m not originally from the US myself and just learned this a couple of years ago. Never seen it anywhere else but the US.
Even the latest iOS has letters on the numbers.
That said I hated when they’d advertise their phone number with the letters vs the numbers. Sure it’s easier to remember. But the translation just never came easy to me.
I never once used one of these.
Quite a bit different than in-Game DLC crap. Plus I’m sure you could block 900 numbers on your line.
1-900-28-VIRGIN
Wait, some countries didn’t have letters on their dialpads? Maybe this was just a thing in English speaking countries?
I never heard of anything like that in Europe. I always wondered about why americans dial letters.
I frankly don’t remember whether the dialpads had letters in Brazil, possibly didn’t; but I do remember that no number ever advertised like that mix, it was always the whole number
My parents would have ensured my soul left my body if I had tried to call one of these
I remember having to beg my folks to be able to call the Nintendo hotline a couple times during childhood when I was completely and utterly stuck in a game on NES. At least the people answering were pretty prompt–I don’t think it took more than 5 mins to get the info I needed.
Never used any of these hotlines.
What I did use were the magazines you could find at most stores at the time. Those would have walkthroughs and guides for most of the games available at the time.
The difference between games journalism in the past and today isn’t that the reviews were more honest and reliable back in the day, it’s that the magazines provided more stuff in addition to the reviews (previews, tips, etc) that made them worthwhile.
I also went with magazines or small “cheats only” booklets, since they cost about 3 minutes of a hotline call, hoping it’d have the cheats for the games I wanted. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. Then there were the cheats that just didn’t work
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.
After reading your comment I had to do more searching and I guess they did actually use it in America… For the bike that I never saw in person, made by Life Fitness.
Edit to add: Now I wonder if I’ll ever find one now that I’m looking
Wow. 1994 is the date of this.
Our local library had the cheat books by then.
Also, the text guides were online either BBS or Usenet. I remember printing out guides by 1994. I guess that wasn’t as common as I thought if people were spending on 1-900 numbers. I wonder how much they made doing this?
Gotta remember that home computers weren’t “popular” back then either (it was easier for a household to have no computer than to have any), so anything on the internet would be the equivalent of browsing freenet, gemini or i2p today
