Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Telephone Sevices

You know when you call a business and you get a computer which tells you to press 1 for this and two for that, etc... When did that technology first come into existance? Also, when did it come into common use?

Also... when was the hold function on a phone first invented? When did it come into common use?

I've been searching the internet for an answer, but so far haven't had any luck. Any help would be appreciated.

ML

I remember that in 1999 I interviewed with a company that did the programming for those voice mail mazes. (I turned down the subsequent job offer, thank goodness - I don't have to take any blame for those abominations!) IIRC, such systems were pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time - not very many business had them yet.

I hope that helps.

Joy,
Lynn

I think the hold function for business phones has been around since the days (which I've only seen in old movies) that there was a live switchboard operator asking you to hold. I don't ever remember thinking of it as anything new, so it must have been common in any business where there were multiple lines when I got my first office job in 1979.

P.S. You didn't ask, but the office also had a fax machine. However, they called it a "telecopier"; I don't remember when facsimile machine got shortened to fax.

The hold button was invented in 1962 apparently ( http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_invented_the_hold_button )

The automated attendant was patented in 1988. So they probably didn't really become popular until the 90s. This was the first system that used "press one for Marketing, two for Accounts payable" etc. Answering machines have been around a lot longer (first answering machine was invented in 1935) but your calls couldn't be automatically routed to another line. Centrex and PBX systems (late 50s early 60s) allowed for call forwarding, call parking, call pickup and hunt groups (if the primary line is busy, the call "hunts" to the next available line in a group; if all lines in a hunt group are busy, the caller gets a busy signal). Mostly very large organizations, businesses with multiple locations or governmental agencies used these type of systems before the 70s.

AmyN

There was an episode in Married... with Children that had Al Bundy frustrated with the automated routing service. That was early to mid-nineties. Definitely around during L&C's air-time.

Michael

Thanks, guys. I guess that means I can't use the automated routing service in 1987, but I can use the hold function.

I'm starting to think that Molly Flynn had a point. Technology is definitely advancing too fast.

ML

You know, considering that the L+C world has a man that can fly, clones, time travel, etc., it doesn't seem too off-base for the auto-attendant to have been invented a little earlier. The technology needed to make an auto-attendant work was around for long enough before it existed for it to have been a plausible invention a few years earlier than 1988. I think you should just assume Luthor Technologies came up with it in order to save Luthor from having to hire receptionists for all of his subsidiaries and annoy all of the callers, too (it was probably his idea in the first place).

AmyN

To follow up with Amy's comment - they had a space station with colonists and everything in 93. Surely they had the annoying automated crap before they had that kind of space technology...

AmyN wrote:

Carol said:

AmyN and Carol may be right, of course, but there are other possibilities as well. Remember that LnC is a fantasy where fantastic elements have been grafted onto a very 1990s United States of America. We can assume that this 1990s fantasy world has all kinds of twenty-first century technology, but it isn't self-evident that it must be like that.

In the 1950s Isaac Asimov wrote his Foundation trilogy. In the world he created people have invented fantastic spaceships that zip this way and that faster than light all across the galaxy. But guess what? They don't have computers. Those same people who can travel faster than light all over the galaxy don't have computers, so they are forced to use blackboards when they calculate. Why don't the people in Asimov's trilogy have computers? Silly question. Because Asimov himself couldn't imagine computers. He could imagine faster-than-light spaceships, but not computers, so his heroes had to use ultra-large blackboards and pieces of chalk to work through their incredibly convoluted calculations.

To me, Asimov's trilogy is really a space fantasy grafted onto a 1950s world, with the specific limitations of a 1950s world, such as the non-existence of computers (or at least the non-existence of computers that were any good). I think it is reasonable to think of LnC as a superhero fantasy grafted onto a 1990s world, with the specific limitations of a 1990s world compared with a 21st century one. And that's why Lois and Clark, and Lex Luthor for that matter, may not necessarily have all the things that we take for granted today. And that may be true even if the world they live in has space colonists and clones that can be grown to adulthood in a day.

On the other hand, ML, there is nothing wrong about choosing the option that AmyN and Carol suggested!

Ann

Two very different and interesting ways of looking at this. The nice thing for me is that it sort of leaves it open for me to do whatever I want . (Does this mean we won't eventually get anti-gravity cars like Nan talks about in her Home series? )

Thanks.

ML

And what's that technology called? Is it "a voice mail menu"? "automated receptionist"?

In my day job I have to phone several fairly large companies occasionally. I'd say that I started getting the "press 1" etc. routine around 1995, with most companies using something of the sort by 2000. The voice controlled ones first became a nuisance 4 or 5 years ago.

Despite my wish for the flying cars, I shudder to think of the carnage in the airways. Heck, look at how many people can't even drive a car adequately in only two dimensions.

True that. But it would probably make daily life that much more lovely. Imagine being able to drive to Cairo or the Great Wall on a whim!

Hi Sayo,

Just wanted to congratulate you again on your marriage. It took me a second to place that this post was from you -- I'm so used to seeing "Tanaka".

Joy,
Lynn