Slashdot Mirror
John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way To All-Digit Dialing, Dies At 94
First time accepted submitter g01d4 writes "Who was John E. Karlin? 'He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could answer some questions about telephone design,' according to Ed Israelski, an engineer who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s. And you thought Steve Jobs was cool. An interesting obituary in the NYT."
I want to know if they are his fault. It's annoying to have phones different from everything else that has a keypad.
Kudos
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Woody Allen's piece on the invention of the sandwich ("Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?" in "Getting Even")
I shall mourn his loss.
He was also the Father of the User Interface. He was the first to take human factors into consideration in the design or products.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Well, Steve Jobs invented the phone after all.
Well, Steve Jobs didn't want a keypad on his iPhone, so I guess he didn't think it was cool enough for a phone, directly contradicting John Karlin's life work in the psychology of telephone design. But we know Karlin was cool too, so now there's the obvious question, who was cooler? Because I need to know if keypads on a phone is hot or not.
I've worked jobs with nine-button phones and with mechanical / electro-mechanical calculators.
Mostly, you'd take a breath and reset internally to make the swap. And hopefully notice not too many taps past the inevitable reversals. While cursing whoeverinhell didn't follow the established international keypad convention with the new phones.
It's not like calculators were exotic. Sure nobody had them at home, but a hell of a lot of people used them at work. Basic kit of all clerical work everywhere.
I still screw-up by 'reversing' sometimes on the computer keypad. It's a scar.
But cheers John Karlin. I'm sure you did your best with a difficult choice.
I'm sure all digital dialing had its problems and not everyone thought it was cool either. It probably was more beneficial though than anything Steve "invented".
According to TFA a Bell Labs engineer named Mallina patented a touchtone layout years before anyone else had even thought about the problem, only it was two rows of five buttons (1-5 above 6-0), which was eventually rejected by Karlin's group.
I think I'd actually prefer the two row layout in terms of dialing speed, although there would be a question of fit with today's phones.
When I got my second cell phone in 2007, I also switched from T-Mobile to Sprint. I narrowed down my choices to the Motorola RAZR or ic502, both clamshell models. The deciding factor: the RAZR didn't have a raised dot on the 5 key, so I got the ic502.
I hated that phone every minute of the next three and a half years.
Doesn't the phone company charge an extra fee for digital dialing? As if it's still costing them extra?
He was also the Father of the User Interface. He was the first to take human factors into consideration in the design or products.
No, that goes back at least to the Gilbreths. Frank Gilbreth created time and motion study for industrial work. His wife, Lillian Gilbreth was more on the product side. She is responsible, among other things, for kitchens with long continuous counter space with cooking surfaces and sinks at the same level.
The first "intelligent user interface" is hard to pinpoint. Railroad interlocking control boards were close. They prevented the operator from doing anything that would cause a collision (that's why they're called interlockings) but didn't help set up routes. The General Railway Signal NX system in 1936 was probably the first automatic intelligent user interface. Routes were set up by pressing a button to indicate where a train was going to enter the controlled area. Lights on a track model board would then light up indicating all the places it could exit. The operator would select one, push one exit button, and all the switches and signals for the route would be set accordingly. The control system took into account all trains present, and all routes already set up, so only safe routes could be set. The operator could even set track or switches out of service and the system would route trains around the area of trouble.
Don't tell me: John Karlin and the Touch-Tones.
I see you've been marked "Flamebait" and the parent comment was marked "-1 Troll". Let me just add my voice: lsulfate also thinks Steve Jobs was not cool.
When I was a kid, we had a variety of telephones in the house. Some hung on the wall, some had dials, and some had buttons. In the beginning, all of the phones (including those with buttons) used pulse dialing. I remember two distinct conversations between my parents regarding this issue, the first from sometime in the 80s and the second in the early 90s:
1. "Should we pay for Touch-Tone(tm) service?" "It's expensive. We already pay too much for phone service." "It's only a couple of dollars a month, and we can dial faster."
And so it was. We had Touch-Tone(tm), and life was really neither better nor worse, just different. It was a line-item on the bill until
2. "They want to sell us call waiting and three-way calling and distinctive ring services, all bundled up. Can we use those?" "Maybe. Then the kids would have their own phone numbers."
And so it was. With the change of service, the Touch-Tone(tm) item dropped off, though I remember my dad calling to order package and insisting upon it being that way...
And as an adult, I've never been billed for it. And these days, I don't have a land line at all. Come to think of it, it's been years since I've used a real phone that actually used DTMF itself: It's always either a digital office phone, some incarnation of VOIP, or a cell phone.
Kid-proof tablet..
No-one thinks Steve Jobs is cool, except the douchiest of Apple fanatics. He wore sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck. That is not cool.
Actually, as a non Apple fanatic; I thought he was pretty cool. Went a bit too far in his later years though.
I think far too many people think of him only in his "hip" later years, showing off the latest iGadget to crowds of adoring fans then heading back to Apple and being a "hard taskmaster" to the developers. They then retroactively apply this personality to his earlier years and assume he was always a douche. By all accounts he was a bit of a revolutionary back then; a "fuck the system, I'll do what I want" kind of guy. I admire that in business leaders in the technical world.
He appeared to truly want things to be better for people. He probably didn't achieve that and definitely lost sight of some important aspects of "better" in his later years; but desire is what should be measured for the mettle of a man, not results. So, I still give him the benefit of the doubt - he wanted things to be better, and he tried really hard to achieve that result. That's something that I personally find pretty cool.
(although I'd rather swap my toilet paper for sand paper than be forced to use an iPhone or iPad as my daily mobile computing device - so you can hardly call me an Apple fan)
But you are right that this comment has absolutely NOTHING to do with the topic.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
The only way for upstanding citizens to protect themselves from this madness is to retreat from modern society entirely.
You could start by cutting your Internet connection.
Well, Steve Jobs invented the phone after all.
I know it's funny, but someone modded it as "Informative"! (as at 1014 hrs GMT) Is there a way here of modding a mod as "funny"?
But we know Karlin was cool
Karlin was cool? Sounds like a jerk to me.
1) Got numeric keys the wrong way up
2) Shortens co-workers phone leads in the middle of the night until they complained loud enough for him to hear. They might have been irritated long before that point, and how would they necessarily know to complain to him. Could he not have confined the experiment to his own phone? Co-incidentally, yesterday I rigged a cord for an overhead bathroom switch. It only took a minute to fix an optimum length by trying it, and getting my wife to try it too.
3) Replaces a rotary dial with push buttons - a no-brainer as all electro-mechanical devices were being replaced with electronics at that time.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
No-one thinks Steve Jobs is cool .... He wore sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck. That is not cool.
Hey, steady on, sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck were cool (in 1963).
If it makes you feel any better, you probably would have hated the RAZR, too. All but the very last GSM model had shit reception and its wasn't that hot either. They were awkward to hold because of their thin-ness and the battery life was crap, maybe half of triplets.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think far too many people think of him only in his "hip" later years, showing off the latest iGadget to crowds of adoring fans then heading back to Apple and being a "hard taskmaster" to the developers. They then retroactively apply this personality to his earlier years and assume he was always a douche.
But some people have read folklore.org and the Tao of Mac and we know that he was always a douche.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The system with higher numbers on top goes back to the Roman and Chinese abacus, so it's not arbitrary at all.
Gee, I can smell it already. Are you suggesting it's again all the way back to width of the Horse Arse !
My father refused to pay extra for touch tone, and never did. They kept charging extra long after it was all computerized and there was no more specialized hardware listening for clicks on the company side.
Don't know about today, but about 5 years ago my old house only had rotary-enabled service, so we would dial to renew prescriptions and then switch he button to touch tone.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
1) Got numeric keys the wrong way up
I don't know how you count in your country, but we count from 1 to 9 without any jumping back from 9 to 4 or from 6 to one.
Which happens to be the order of keys on a telephone. Repeat after me: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
You probably shouldn't have watched Sesame Street episodes out of order... :-)
bickerdyke
http://dmdb.org/lyrics/freberg.underground.html#A4
Alas, I couldn't find a site with an actual audio recording of it--the tune was as funny as the lyrics.
When I was a kid, we had, gasp, a party line. You didn't even need to dial
to hear a conversation. Ah, the good ol' days.
No, I didn't.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The 70s called
And you thought Steve Jobs was cool to the touch
FTFY
Western Electric took their time and engineered a marvel of function. Too bad nobody bothered to save the tooling for those things.
A lot more engineering effort nowadays is rightly focused on the extremely profitable control of product life cycles.
I wonder what sort of volume Unicomp is doing lately?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
'...sneakers and jeans and black turtleneck were cool (in 1963).'
No, they weren't.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Somebody spends too much time studying at the feet of Master Jeff Rense.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
What other seven-digit numbers would you need to remember? 867-5309?
My dad's cell has been his primary phone for over a decade, and he still doesn't store any numbers on the phone. He dials an ungodly number of, er, numbers from memory.
If it weren't for him, Jenny's Phone Number might have been "UNion 75309".
Doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Pulse dialing actually cost the phone company more for a long time, as I understand it, because it kept the switching circuitry busy longer than tone dialing. But they'd won the right to charge extra for tone dialing, and the more people shifted to tone dialing (for its obvious benefits), the more money they could get.
My wife and I were also holdouts, keeping our cheap electronic phones set to pulse-dial (hit "speed dial 8", then wait for the clickety-clicking to finish), switching to tone-dial as needed for voicemail. Even if it wasn't worth spending a few extra seconds a day to save a few extra cents a day, it was worth it to us to deny the phone company those ill-gotten cents.
10th doctor - sneakers. Jobs was 33% cool.
You've also just described what I was wearing frequently in 63 (at 9 years old) so thanks, I think.
Who is John Cabal?
When we were growing up on our little island in the Caribbean we could just pick up the 'phone --- and yes, oh best beloved, in those days an apostrophe would typically precede the word phone --- we'd dial five digits. And the call would just go through.
Not seven, not ten. Never eleven! It is so obvious looking back, the seconds we saved by not dialing those unnecessary digits stretched into minutes, hours, days... by 1980 we were wandering, listless, the burden of those extra hours weighed heavily on us. Many would gaze at their telephones, silently pleading for some sign or answer. But the phones were silent too --- with so much accrued time it was pointless, there was nothing left to say, all had been said.
Then one day a visitor came ashore and asked the number for such-and-such. While dialing the five digits they remarked, "We dial seven. This would not work where I come from."
What an disturbing idea! Ripples of amusement and shock passed through our small society. 'Phones began to ring once again as people mulled this concept. It was unsettling, the idea that should we venture too far from home those familiar numbers we use to communicate would simply not work!
But how far was too far, we wondered? In whispers at first. For now it was possible there was some unknown, invisible boundary surrounding us. For our safety and that of our children it must be mapped. So we asked for volunteers... and sent them out to neighboring islands at all points of the compass, and the US mainland --- and waited by our 'phones.
We sighed with relief when the first reports came in from adjacent islands. Five digits, all clear!
But then our worst fears were confirmed. From Puerto Rico, nothing. From The United States, nothing. We never heard from those brave souls again. Time accrued and the days became longer still.
Then one day a village idiot --- the same who had once suggested we borrow a lug nut from each of the other wheels --- wondered that maybe there are really seven digits... but two of them are somehow invisible. A digits of the land and one of the sky he said, that are unknown to us because we live on and breathe them unaware.
I was intrigued by this idea. What would those digits be? How could one discover them? There are only a hundred possibilities. We all were amused by this but I was perhaps the first one who actually started dialing through them. That is when I discovered that 'phones are patient. Unlike all the people I knew, my 'phone did not seem to mind if I repeatedly dialled numbers that did not work. I had found a new friend!
It is hard to describe what happens after a lifetime of complacent acceptance, as one applies barely an hour of concentrated effort towards some insane idea -- only to reach a moment where you break through and the world changes forever. The call went through and my friend picked up and I heard a familliar 'Hello?' For In those days, oh best beloved, when we answered our 'phone we always said "Hello." We did not bark or grunt, and especially not the impolite "...yes?" or "what the fuck now??" of today.
I shouted breathlessly "I am speaking to you from SEVEN DIGITS! SEVEN! Can you hear me??" Sure, he said, I don't think he knew what I meant and it was past midnight anyway. Being a scientist or explorer of uncharted waters is a heady responsibility. I circled and underlined the two amazing digits and proceeded to complete the sweep. The next combination yielded nothing, and the next. Finally --- the last.
Only one circled pair of digits on my worksheet. I had concieved a simple experiment of technology that was bound to an existential question, performed an exploratory experiment and had obtained a clear and astounding result. We were all saved, we could dial seven digits now like everyone else... and all our time would be spent dialing --- glorious dialing!
I hugged my 'phone.
And in days to come I would discover that dialling a leading '1' forced long distance trunking to occur (Why are these local numbe
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
My father refused to pay extra for touch tone, and never did. They kept charging extra long after it was all computerized and there was no more specialized hardware listening for clicks on the company side.
Don't know about today
My Dad also refused to pay extra for touch tone, and I also thought it was a ridiculous fee after everything was computerized.
I'm not sure when they stopped charging (early 90's, maybe?), but now it's no longer a line item. And my parents have touch tone service.
When I was in gradeschool this song came out: the Let's All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March:
I was too young at the time to understand what it was about, but it is amusing now.
Here in Canada it was the same situation. $3 extra a month for touch-tone dialing from Bell. My parents refused to pay. At some point maybe in the late 90's new accounts were forced to be touch-tone, but you still had to pay the extra $3. It just was no longer a line item in the bill, tricky bastards.
Older accounts like ours were exempted from the forced switch. And until I ported the number to VoIP last year we were still saving on that $3 every month.
Now they pay $2 a month for a DID number service from voip.ms. Take that Bell Canada.
Between VoIP for your landlines, digital terrestrial channels for TV, Netflix, 3rd party ISPs like Teksavvy and Wind Mobile for cell phones there *is* a path to freedom from the communication oligopolies that run Canada.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
What other seven-digit numbers would you need to remember?
Any number, like the plumber's, that you have just looked up in a directory or got off the Web needs to be transferred to the phone pad. Perhaps I'm retarded, but I cannot do that without glancing back at the number part way through.
.... but not the order of keys on a calculator or a full PC keyboard. Se elsewhere in this discussion for why this is. .
I guess I'm not getting the point of that strip. I've never run into a residential or cellular voice mail system that requires DTMF interaction to leave a message. If anything it's "press 1 or stay on the line". Which modern voice mail system is it satirizing?
.... but not the order of keys on a calculator or a full PC keyboard. Se elsewhere in this discussion for why this is. .
Yes, but the key order on a calculator is the wrong one as it is NOT going straight from 1 to 9. Yes, there were reasons why they put them in a different order, but that does not automatically makes that the right order.
bickerdyke
It was found that telephone numbers could be remembered better if the exchange was last. If you look up a number, the exchange is likely to be a familiar number, one of maybe ten, while the other four digits are essentially new to you. You have a better chance of remembering the number long enough to dial it if the unfamiliar part comes first. Never implemented, probably because the nature of stepping relays made it impractical.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_plus_or_minus_two
You're retarded, but you're in good company. Unless I can compress it some way I can't do 6 reliably.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Oh, and :-
6) Shortened phone leads from 3 ft, which sounds long. However in the 1950/60s office phones were quite scarce and often shared between several people. Desks were placed face-to-face in pairs or groups of four to share a phone, in which case that 3 ft was all needed, and more. But, Karlin worked in a phone company office, where no doubt phones were all over the place and that fact does not seem to have occurred to him.
I have worked with people like Karlin. The same sort of busy-bodies who will change your chair height and adjust your screen brightness when you are not looking because they have views on the subject. They volunteer for the "Elf and Safety" courses and become the office safety vigilante, and get biscuits banned at meetings because they are considered unhealthy. They are jerks.
Oh, and :-
5) He thought that to go electronic and/or to extend the srange, the dial code needed to be all digits. Why? The old alpha characters were already translated into digits, so why couldn't buttons do the same?
FTFA : "telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers". Who said they had to be pronouncable? My postcode (zip code to Americans?) and most others are not pronouncable (eg mine starts "NP16" - the 16th area of Newport - and goes on with another digit and two letters which I dont want to put here) but neverthless are much easier to remember than all-digit phone numbers.
4) Believed that people can remember a 7-digit number - they can't, unless it is one they use regularly
Really? - Numbers here in Denmark are 8-digit and I remember most of the numbers in my contact list and often dial them directly instead of using the contact list.
Oh, and US numbers are actually 10-digit, but for most local and semi-local calls the 3-digit area code can be omitted.
We used to have the same kind of area codes in Denmark (6-digit numbers and 2-digit area codes that could be omitted on local calls) but about 20 years ago it was decided to throw away the disposable area codes and merge them with the phone numbers, making them always 8-digit. This also allowed for portable numbers that could be moved all over the country, from provider to provider and of course from fixed line to mobile and back.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Those old registers reminded me of the first one that I used, an NCR (National Cash Register) that was already old for its time. The data plate called out the required power: Zero to 120 volts, zero to 60 cycles. And if the power failed, you could stick a crank in the side.
The Touch Tone system may have been offered to private subscribers in 1963, but the 1962 World's Fair was serviced by a Touch Tone switch brought in especially for the event. All the payphones in the fairgrounds were Touch Tone.
You know what pisses me off?
To dial long distance, I have to dial "1-" first (which is OK, since I don't want to call LD by accident). But if I do dial "1-" and then a number that isn't long distance,
it says "BEE-BEE-BEEP Your call can not be put through as dialed. Please dial again."
Knowing what is long distance and what isn't is very complicated around here. If I start the number with "1-" it means "I don't care if the number is long distance".
If I don't care that the number is long distance, I certainly won't care if it isn't.
So annoying.