Anti-Digit Dialing League: A Brief Overview and Historical Context

The Anti-Digit Dialing League was a movement that emerged in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in response to the growing use of all-number calling (also known as "digit dialing") for telephone calls. At the time, most telephone calls were made by dialing a combination of letters and numbers, which corresponded to the name of the telephone exchange and the number of the individual phone line. For example, if you wanted to call someone in the "Broadway" exchange, you would dial "BR" and then the corresponding numbers.

However, with the advent of direct-dial long-distance calling, it became necessary to use all-number dialing, which was seen by some as an impersonal and dehumanizing way to communicate. The Anti-Digit Dialing League was formed to protest against this trend and to advocate for the retention of the traditional letter-and-number system.

Despite the efforts of the League, all-number dialing eventually became the standard for telephone calls in the United States and in many other countries around the world. However, some telephone companies continued to offer letter-and-number dialing as an option for many years, and some people still use it today for nostalgic or practical reasons.

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AI Technical Trustability Update

While working on an update to my RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook project to add a couple calculators about FM sidebands (available soon). The good news is that AI provided excellent VBA code to generate a set of Bessel function plots. The bad news is when I asked for a table showing at which modulation indices sidebands 0 (carrier) through 5 vanish, none of the agents got it right. Some were really bad. The AI agents typically explain their reason and method correctly, then go on to produces bad results. Even after pointing out errors, subsequent results are still wrong. I do a lot of AI work and see this often, even with subscribing to professional versions. I ultimately generated the table myself. There is going to be a lot of inaccurate information out there based on unverified AI queries, so beware.

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