What is pound on the phone

Open main menu. Search form Search this site. Topics How-To. Author Details. Author Details Leanne Hays. The origins of this term date back to the s and s in Bell Labs with the first documented place this word showed up being in a U. However, what is known is that it was a term engineers at Bell Labs started using as early as the s when Bell Labs was working on interfacing techniques between computers and telephones. Ralph Carlsen of Bell Labs wrote a memorandum on this symbol upon his retirement in where he states that Don Macpherson came up with the name when he went out to instruct their first client of the new telephone system, the Mayo Clinic.

This seems less plausible than the previous story. Hi, thought there was a comment, came looking for it, found none. Octothorpe most commonly I thought had to do with cartography. It represents a town the box surrounded by eight fields three north, three south, one east, one west. As a bonus: hexadecimal?

This was considered scandalous and could not be abided. So we came up with Six — And — Ten Hex — a — decimal. In an octal base there are eight symbols 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7. In a binary base there are only 2 symbols 0 and 1. This way the same quantity may be represented in different bases. The way it worked was, the user pushed a button and it made a combination of two sounds.

A microphone hooked to a computer listened for the sounds and was able to decode the number. Two tones together were used because it made it harder for the computer to mistake the sound of someone singing or some background noise.

This is the first touch tone phone. Notice anything missing? They were added in , but no one knew what to do with them. By the s, people figured out what to do with the extra buttons.