13 year old girl holds vinyl record for the first time. baffled why so few songs on massive disk

[jmowreader]

52. Do you know WHY they had alphabetic characters as part of the number?

That was from the days of Named Exchanges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names

A telephone exchange can have 9,999 subscribers. Theoretically it can have 10,000 subscribers--0000 to 9999--but they usually don't assign 0000 to anyone. So, 0001 to 9999.

If a community has more than that, they need more than one dial central office. In the really old days, each DCO had a name. If DU was a city with 25,000 telephones in it, we might have exchanges named Skinner 1, EarlG 2 and Elad 3.

Before Mr. Almon Strowger and his wonderful invention, the automatic telephone switching system, came along, you would pick up your phone and ask to be connected to exchange Skinner 1, where your friend would have the number 1234. When they invented automatic switching, you would dial SK1 (751), which would cause the machine to connect you to exchange Skinner 1, and then dial 1234 to reach your friend.

For more fun: old General Telephone switchgear would allow subscribers calling other subscribers on the same exchange to just dial the last number of the exchange prefix. The community I grew up in was serviced by GTE. Our exchange number was 245, but you only had to dial the 5.