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    Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works

    (www.acma.gov.au)
    284 points nomilk | 14 comments | 30 Oct 25 21:49 UTC | HN request time: 1.037s | source | bottom
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    waltbosz ◴[30 Oct 25 23:29 UTC] No.45766658[source]▶
    In the early days of the Internet, there was this website with a list of payphone numbers from all over the United States. In my state, there were only three entries, and my home phone number was one of them. It was listed as being outside a publicly traded chain restaurant.

    On occasion, radio stations would do bits where they would call a random payphone from the website. My house was called 3 times for the same bit by different radio stations. Within a month apart, I spoke to two different stations from New Zealand. MoreFM was one of them, but I don't remember the other. I do remember that that were very disappointed when I told them I had just spoken to MoreFM a month prior. Also MoreFM was the only station that didn't end the bit when I explained it was not a pay phone

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    nomilk ◴[30 Oct 25 23:49 UTC] No.45766833[source]▶
    > website with a list of payphone numbers ... my home phone number was one of them

    Did you find out how this came to be, or just random typo?

    Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)

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    fletchowns ◴[31 Oct 25 00:22 UTC] No.45767021[source]▶
    > Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)

    If you want to let somebody know you can't talk right now but you will call them back in 10 minutes, this makes it possible without having them use another quarter (coin currency in US) to call you back in 10 minutes, or requiring them to feed quarters in while you wait on hold for 10 minutes.

    Also plenty of other reasons that we've all seen in spy movies :)

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    1. andy99 ◴[31 Oct 25 10:27 UTC] No.45770414[source]▶
    Also in Neuromancer when Wintermute wants to talk to Case and is ringing all the pay phones. I’ve read that book a dozen times and never thought twice about it. It was recently pointed out to me how incongruous it is to be in the future with AI and cyberspace and orbital colonies but there are still pay phones.
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    2. trashb ◴[31 Oct 25 10:40 UTC] No.45770505[source]▶
    I think at the time of writing payphones where still so common that it was hard to imagine a world without them. The payphones are also quite fundamental to hacking culture due to the roots in "phone phreaking" which is used in the story. So perhaps it was included due to association with those elements as it will give the reader some context of at that time the current day in this futuristic world and ground them in the fictional universe.
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    3. ljm ◴[31 Oct 25 10:52 UTC] No.45770576[source]▶
    Also so The Machine can give you the encoded social security number of someone who is either going to commit a crime or become the victim of one so pre-conspiracy Jim Caviezel can come and save your life or blow your kneecaps out.
    4. Razengan ◴[31 Oct 25 13:07 UTC] No.45771569[source]▶
    This is actually something I was thinking about lately: How science fiction (and future-predictors) mostly only extrapolates from our current ways of doing things.

    Like those Victorian era drawings of people in posh dresses walking across lakes by having hot-air balloons tied to their bodies..

    Even sci-fi games involving space ships and aliens have people using floppy disks, printouts, and faxes.. in years long after those things went out of common use.

    Before the iPhone very little sci-fi predicted something like smartphones being so prevalent throughout global society. Today even some of the poorest people in the poorest countries have some form of personal mobile phone.

    And even now, the best we can imagine is that people will still be using phones and laptops in 2060.

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    5. ghaff ◴[31 Oct 25 14:09 UTC] No.45772160{3}[source]▶
    There are tons of examples of course, but one that jumps to mind is Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle where one of the plot points is an implant that gives the chosen few access to an encyclopedic database. Of course, today, a smartphone with cell access provides that (or at least a more chaotic version of same) to more or less everyone. You could also reasonably argue that the encyclopedia in Asimov's Foundation trilogy makes somewhat similar assumptions.

    I do think some sort of AR interface is somewhere in the future but it's almost certainly a long way off for mainstream adoption.

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    6. gampleman ◴[31 Oct 25 14:20 UTC] No.45772280{3}[source]▶
    Conversely though, there is plenty of older sci-fi that assumes by the 2000s we'd all be zooming around in flying cars rather than in cars that are basically the same sort of thing they had in the fifties.
    replies(1): >>45772351 #
    7. Razengan ◴[31 Oct 25 14:29 UTC] No.45772351{4}[source]▶
    Oh yes! That is the exact same extrapolation: Just a better, more-exaggerated version of how we already do things!!

    Faster horses!

    8. ErroneousBosh ◴[31 Oct 25 14:32 UTC] No.45772377[source]▶
    It was written in the early 80s on a mechanical typewriter, and released only a very few months after the first Apple Macintosh. Modems were insanely expensive back then and not many people had them.

    So much of the things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist when Johnny Mnemonic was written in 1981, again on a mechanical typewriter.

    9. cruffle_duffle ◴[31 Oct 25 14:50 UTC] No.45772593{3}[source]▶
    Funny I was watching this dude talk about this exact concept just the other night: https://youtu.be/C6D_WuLWVrQ
    10. PopAlongKid ◴[31 Oct 25 14:57 UTC] No.45772679{4}[source]▶
    >Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle

    and Larry Niven!

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    11. ghaff ◴[31 Oct 25 15:03 UTC] No.45772768{5}[source]▶
    Forgot Larry Niven was a co-author of that one. They tended to be a good pair on novel-length works. Niven's novels tended to end up as travelogues and Pournelle's ended up as military SF.
    12. waltbosz ◴[31 Oct 25 16:25 UTC] No.45773847[source]▶
    Sci-fi books are full of reverse anachronisms like that. Worlds with space travel, but no computers.

    Asimov has some good stories where people no longer know how to read and write and multiply because everything is done on computers and all interactions with computers and are done by voice.

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    13. evilDagmar ◴[31 Oct 25 16:41 UTC] No.45773998[source]▶
    "The Feeling of Power" IIRC.
    14. GolfPopper ◴[31 Oct 25 18:35 UTC] No.45775201{3}[source]▶
    E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series, a sweeping, galaxy-scale space opera (arguably the type-example of the genre), first published in 1937 had some memorable examples of this - punch card computers and one diesel-powered space ship. But along with such anachronisms (and more SF tropes than I can readily list), Smith also described video calls, stealth vehicles, and may have invented the Combat Information Center.

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.3.0558