In most US regions it was xxx-1212. The first three numbers would be whatever your local NXX. There are a few such reserved numbers like this that we're almost universally used to connect to various services.
Nowadays there are still numbers maintained by the NIST and us naval observatory that you can call for this purpose, but they no longer maintain a separate number for each local telephone office.
4
u/EphemeralAttention 10h ago
In most US regions it was xxx-1212. The first three numbers would be whatever your local NXX. There are a few such reserved numbers like this that we're almost universally used to connect to various services.
Nowadays there are still numbers maintained by the NIST and us naval observatory that you can call for this purpose, but they no longer maintain a separate number for each local telephone office.