Buttons on phones
The push-button telephone that is about to enter service has demanded a completely new technology that may one day turn it into a domestic computer terminal.
Looking exactly like a conventional instrument, except for its 10-button keypad in place of the rotary dial, it is being sold to the public as 鈥渢he phone with the modern touch鈥�. And while it will set up a call no quicker than a conventional dial, because of the drawbacks of electromechanical telephone exchanges, the keypad will allow the number to be entered much more quickly (typically 5 seconds for a 10-digit number, compared with 14 seconds using a disc dial).
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What the public is not yet aware of is the mind-boggling revolution in telephone development it has started. By the end of the decade, the button dial will be ideally suited to the high-speed switching that the new generation of electronic telephone exchanges will make available, and quite a different type of telephone signalling technique will have begun to enter public service. Known as multi-frequency (MF), this also offers the first chance to use the ordinary telephone as a data-input service. Then the possibilities for entirely new subscriber services are almost endless.
The ultimate would be a full teletype system with a visual display unit that could adopt the full alphanumeric keyboard of a typewriter. Linked to an MF telephone, this could be used not only to key in complicated statements to a computerised database, but also to send letters over the telephone lines at up to 15 characters per second.
From New 杏吧原创, 2 May 1974