Did anyone else notice how phone numbers used to have 4 digits?

I was cleaning out my grandma's old address book last week and found her entry for the flower shop she worked at in the 1940s. It was just four digits, like '2457' with no area code or prefix at all. That blew my mind because I never thought about how a whole city could fit on one switchboard. Makes me wonder what random thing today will seem totally ancient to my kids, you know? Has anyone else found something like that in old family stuff?

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lucas_hunt4d ago

Whoa, hold on, I gotta disagree a little here. Sure, four digits sounds wild now, but I think the real shock is how fast it changed, not that it used to be so simple. My dad always told me about party lines where you literally shared a number with your neighbors and could hear their calls, which sounds way more ancient than a plain four digit code to me. I mean, if you think about it, we already went from big brick cell phones to smartwatches in like thirty years, so my kids are gonna laugh at me for having to type a password instead of just looking at a screen. That grandma address book is a cool find, but I bet she thought her own parents' hand crank phones were the crazy old relic.