Was there ever another phone with a 16-key pad?
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Ohhhhh. OK. I’d heard of Autovon, but never used it. Were “FO”, “F”, “I”, and “P” abbreviations for Autovon functions?
My understanding is that Bell System’s DTMF standard underpins all this and gives a name to each of the sixteen tone pairs, and they’re “A”, “B”, “C”, and “D” there. It seems that Autovon puts its own labels on top, such as “FO” for “A”, in much the same way TouchTone calls “2” both “2” and “ABC”.
Lineman’s keypads do, or did, though I see from a Google search that there are also (perhaps more commonly) 12-key lineman’s keypads.
They marked the precedence of calls - a higher precedence call was allowed to break in on a lower one, or to dump a lower precedence call if there was circuit contention. Calls were by default ‘Routine’; the other indications were ‘Priority’, ‘Immediate’, ‘Flash’ and ‘Flash Override’. The last one was reserved for the President and a handful of top-ranking military officials, and was intended for the ‘the balloon is going up’ call.
AT&T was the prime contractor for AUTOVON, and its wires shared AT&T’s physical plant in spots. They had special red connection blocks rather than the gray or black ones that the commercial wires used, but the same linemen might wind up repairing them and needing an AUTOVON butt set to test them.
My brain just pulled this memory from the ether. (YouTube helped solidify it)
Hence the relevance of:
Smiley said: ‘What was the priority of London Station’s telegram to you?’’
‘Immediate.’
‘But yours was flash?’
‘Both of mine were flash.’
A ‘most urgent’ message about an extremely important matter replied to tardily and with a lower priority.
I believe the precedence designation system is still in use.
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