alt Hacker NewsLong before most of you were born there was a special number you could call to get the time here in the USA. It would give you a localized time every 10 seconds. It was considered an authoritative value, but I knew that normal analog clocks drifted a fair amount, and I was fascinated by the Time voice.
There was also a special number to dial that was called Information. When I was about 12, I suddenly thought that’s amazing, you can just call and get information. What I didn’t know at the time was that it only applied to phone numbers.
One day, I called Information and asked them how accurate the time number was and what mechanism was used to deliver it. Incredibly, they connected my preadolescent self to a public relations person at AT&T. That person somehow took me seriously and hooked me up with another party. And that person told me about the cesium atomic clock used to keep track of the time.
Later, I would call Information to find out the acreage occupied by the Los Angeles Zoo, and it was then that they brusquely explained to me that the number was not for general knowledge.
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For the kids out there, calling a number for recorded information was common in the 90s I guess? Movie times was a big one. Where I was locally, multiple surf shops did 3-4x daily surf reports. The later was a bit funny because if one of the usual update times was missed you knew the waves were good and the guy was surfing :)
In Northern California the number corresponded to POP-CORN, so if you wanted to know the time you called popcorn, and got a lovely lady's voice: "At the tone, the time will be...". The POP prefix was a shortcut to the phone company.
Here in Australia we had a number that gave you the time called 'George the talking clock'.
That's brilliant. Sometimes talking to real humans is great.
It reminds me of two things. When I was a child I was given a postage stamp and wrote a letter to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and posted it. Remarkably, I got a reply from Aardman Animations with a card signed by Nick Park himself. Someone at Royal Mail obviously understood and looked up the real address of the studio.
Later as a teen I noticed the clock on our oven displayed "24:00" at midnight instead of the more conventional "0:00"[0]. I wrote to the manufacturer (Neff) on a support channel and it actually got forwarded through several departments before I received a reply from an engineer quoting ISO8601 and how it doesn't actually specify that midnight has to be 0:00 (although, sadly, I never received a positive reason for why someone made the oven clock like this).
For those of us who remember such interactions it's even more frustrating when you find there's a dumb robot at the end of the line. Even if it's LLM powered. I actually asked ChatGPT what it would do with the Wallace and Gromit letter and it couldn't find the same solution. We lost a lot with Google-style faceless companies.
As for the time, in the UK we had (have?) "The Talking Clock" which you could get to by dialling 123. This was well enough known in 2001 to be a key part of this scene from The Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdBCFV6qa3A&t=146
[0] I just looked this up again and, funnily enough, John Ward showed a similar oven on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_oLT7lWQ44
Also, where I live, radio transmitted the precise time in the most low tech way possible. A person said: "It is XX:XX time with the beep" and this was followed by four beeps, three short, one long, with the end of the last beep signifying the exact moment of the announced time.