Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
Yes, the number of digits depended on how many customers were connected to a particular switchboard. My town had a population of barely five hundred souls, plus the nearby outlying farms. With fewer than 999 households we could easily fit into three digits. The nearest city, about fifteen miles away had around ten thousand people, and they had four digit numbers.
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My home town had only 2,800 people, but that was enough to bump us up into the 4 digits range. I can't remember what the grandparents and extended family numbers were as they lived in other towns. I do remember that when I was still young Ma Bell changed us over to the current Area Code + three-digit exchange + 4-digit system. When my parents retired and moved way out into a rural area in the late 1970s they actually went backwards in time and had an old party-line system because the Baby Bell out there was too cheap to run more lines into the sparsely populated area.