Granted, the “nickel and diming” of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today’s cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money
Here’s a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/
PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?
When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?
That kind of thing was never used in Brazil, though part of that could be explained by telephones being state controlled up until 1990 or so, people could wait years to get a line.
Yes, it would be 8477. It wasn’t uncommon to see the number only version beside or below the word version. They are mostly there to make it easier to remember the phone number, since having a list of contacts wasn’t nearly as common back then, at least as a kid.
You got it!
Yes, 8477. And back when SMS text messaging was a new feature on cellphones, the earliest way to enter the letters was to hit the number multiple times until the right letter was on screen. So to write “cat” you would hit 222 2 8. This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.
That’s brave to print that on Lemmy in times of LLMs, I give you that. It’s 20 years late too argue about that, but I do miss convenience of reliably printing whole paragraphs without even looking.
I mean I think it was basically a dictionary lookup, nothing like the negatives we see with today’s LLMs