AT&T Stops 'Time', Ends An Era

theoeag writes "Starting in September, you will no longer be able to pick up a landline, payphone, etc and find out what time it is at the beep. AT&T, which has had the service since the 20s, cited a lack of demand in the digital age as the reason for "time"'s extinction. Actually, the service had already stopped in most states, but Nevada and California — with their large rural and unmapped areas — were still holding out, should the lost motorist or weary hiker need to know the time of day. But no more! The "Time Machine", which consisted of two large drum-like devices that contained several audio-tracks and a quite advanced system for syncing up with the caller, will probably end up in a museum, anxiously awaiting the arrival of its cousin: The Pay-Phone."

Evil

[calvy]

This is by far the most evil thing AT&T has done. How can they take time away from us? Gasp

Re:

[Miamicanes]

I'm still amazed that they actually use the same ancient machines to do it. I mean, dear god, even if the hourly fees and hardware cost were completely jacked up to outrageous levels, you could probably hire a consultant to make an Asterisk-based system with multiple layers of hardware redundancy to do the exact same thing (wait for ring, answer, announce the current time & temperature, then hang up) for less than it probably cost to lease and maintain those old machines for one year...

Why it existed

[Joaz Banbeck]

Actually, for legal reasons that wouldn't work. You see, they need to use the same time marking as the billing system.

I found this out years ago when my GF was getting really persistent obscene phone calls. We called the phone company to ask for their help. They said to write down the time and date of each call. They specifically said to call their number for the time. I asked why. They said that way they could be sure who made the call to within 10 seconds, otherwise an eventual prosecution of the caller was sure to fail because the defense could argue that the GF's clock was off by just a few minutes, and that would be room for reasonable doubt.

BTW, I presume that they have concluded that it is no longer neccesary because everyone's cell phone has relatively accurate time ( and the clocks that are set according to cell time ).

Re:Why it existed

[InterruptDescriptorT]

I found this out years ago when my GF was getting really persistent obscene phone calls.
Sorry about that. I've moved on and starting harassing someone else's GF. No hard feelings, I hope. :)

Re:Evil

[sqldr]

How can they take time away from us?

They usually do that by way of their automated call-queueing system.

Kind of sad

[WindBourne]

I remember listening to this in the early 60's. I thought that it was pretty. Obviously, the current tech surpases that. In fact, You will shortly be able to obtain an atomic clock chip at a "reasonable" price. But the idea of just picking up the phone and getting the tick off was reassuring, esp when we had lost electricity for up to 2 weeks at a time.

Re:

[Deadstick]

When I was a kid in Miami, early Fifties, the service was known as "the Coca-Cola Lady"...she'd give a one-sentence plug for Coke before announcing the time.

rj

Re:

[Garabito]

In fact, You will shortly be able to obtain an atomic clock chip at a "reasonable" price

Yes, and plutonium will be available at every corner drugstore.

Re:It's more than sad. Help! Anyone got alternativ

[jimstapleton]

Give them a number starting in 411, i.e. (area code)-411-whatever, such as (419)-411-4321

They won't know the difference, but the locale should transfer them to information.

Go with the classic

[benhocking]

(area code) 555-1212 — this connects you to information for any area code, AFAIK.

Re:It's more than sad. Help! Anyone got alternativ

[MyLongNickName]

202 456 1414

No productive work goes on there, so you won't be interrupting anyone.

LOL; Darn good choice

[WindBourne]

I may have to use that as well.

Sure do -- some of these services still exist

[FreelanceWizard]

You can still get time and temperature (preceded by an advertisement for Captain D's) at:

901-526-5261

It's commonly known around Memphis, TN -- at least among those who know about it -- as "JAMJAM1".

Re:It's more than sad. Help! Anyone got alternativ

[iabervon]

There's always AT&T teleconference systems. They'll get a voice asking for a password they don't have before they get to anything important, and that's unlikely to go away any time soon. You can find a ton of them by searching for corporate announcement conference call info.

Re:It's more than sad. Help! Anyone got alternativ

[WMD_88]

NIST: 303 499 7111
Gives time in UTC, so you'll have to shift over for your time zone.

Re:

[putaro]

867-5309

Re:

[WindBourne]

That kind of stuff has never bugged me. It was when I was in a store the other day,listening to the muzak and realized that it was stuff from my teens that I was hearing. That was actually funny to realize that the current generation most likely considers it the same way that we would have considered 20's-50's music, that we could hear being piped into the 5 and dime, the movie theatres, or even at the local monky swords.

Re:

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

listening to the muzak and realized that it was stuff from my teens that I was hearing.

That's not as bad as when your kids catch you singing to it in the store.

Inevitable...

[nweaver]

You have NNTP, the broadcast atomic clock information, and the cell-phone network, all of which provide exquisitly accurate time to everyone.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

What does a news server have to do with time?

Re:Inevitable...

[Enoxice]

I think you have an extra 'N' in there somewhere...

NTP [wikipedia.org]
NNTP [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[dashslotter]

I don't care! Calling "time" is like pinging yahoo. Warm fuzzies when you connect....

Re:

[RubberDuckie]

Or like 'ping 4.2.2.1'. If that server ever gets eliminated, I will be one unhappy camper.

Re:

[MrNaz]

I'm worried that one day they'll eliminate 127.0.0.1! The day they take that offline I'm in big trouble!

Re:

[OldeTimeGeek]

Yes, and as soon as everybody has computers (NTP), clock radios that can tune to WWV or can get it passively (atomic clock) or a cell phone (cell-phone network), then we can get rid of time services over POTS. Until then, it is still the most highly available service out of all of the above.

Re:

[quantum bit]

You have NNTP, the broadcast atomic clock information, and the cell-phone network, all of which provide exquisitly accurate time to everyone.

NTP, definitely. Radio-based [wikipedia.org] clocks, sure. GPS time signal, absolutely. But the cell network? I'd never in a million years call that exquisitely accurate. Sometimes I wouldn't even call it reasonably accurate.

I don't know where they get their time from, but when I look at a cell phone (with network time sync enabled) and it's more than a minute off, I know not to trust it as a reliable time source.

Re:

[multipartmixed]

What network is this?

I know a certain network operator that had to buy a bunch of cesium clocks when they were upgrading from AMPS to TDMA. This was because the T in TDMA stands for "Time", and the timeslice needs minor monkey business when the phone is far from the tower, because of SOL propagation delay. To do TDMA with a sufficiently small slice to be useful, you need VERY accurate clocks.

And this probably still true today, as GSM is a TDM scheme.

Re:

[Richy_T]

But funnily enough, it doesn't follow that the display on a cell phone would be synced to that fancy-pants clock. It could just as easily be synced to cletus the intern sending a global network SMS to all phones based on what he read off the $3.95 Wal-mart clock hanging on his wall.

Whatever the cause, cell phone clocks are not reliable. Simple as that.

Rich

Re:

[quantum bit]

Cingular. It's been 2-3 years since I first noticed it -- since then I don't really pay much attention to my cell phone clock. I think it was a CDMA network, but I'm not 100% sure. I had a GSM phone after that which was often wrong, but it was a crappy phone and I suspect it wasn't syncing properly.

Now I'm on AT&T/EDGE and it seems to be accurate so far as I can tell.

Just because the clocks are tightly synchronized together, doesn't mean that the base time they're synchronizing to is correct. A Cesi

Re:

[pjviitas]

Unless you live on Baffin Island...then you need a Seiko Quartz Alpinist.

Loses about 10 seconds a year.

Hedghog

Re:

[eln]

I doubt if someone in a developing country was too poor to own a watch he would be spending his money calling long distance to California, where the service is being stopped, to get the time of day.

Re:Inevitable...

[rwoodford]

If you really need to hear a talking clock, call 202-762-1401. The service is provided by the US Naval Observatory.

Re:

[iluvcapra]

A poor person in a developing country can always ask his kid, who will read him the NTP time off their OLPC ;).

Re:

[TheRaven64]

The UK speaking clock, on 123, still works. American who need a time fix can call +44 123, as long as they remember to convert from GMT to their own time zone.

In Romania

[psergiu]

The Romanian equivalent - 958 (058 before the renumbering) - is still going strong - all-trough in form of a 2 node cluster - but with the original voice - digitized.

I feel sorry...

[Treskin]

I feel really sorry for whoever gets assigned the POP-CORN phone number.

Re:

[Treskin]

Funny, I had never Wiki'ed POP-CORN before. I guess this is only used in Northern California so I suppose most won't get the joke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_clock [wikipedia.org]

Sad

[davidc]

I'm sad to see this go. I didn't use it very much but it was kind of reassuring that it was there. Okay, I'm crazy!

I once answered the phone at work, and found that the call was the speaking clock. Weird... folks told me it was probably returning all the past calls I'd placed to it.

Re:Sad

[catbutt]

My weird experience with "time" was one time I called it, and could hear the muffled sounds of everyone else who called it (with the time lady playing in the foreground). So it became like a big chat room, where everyone was asking what other people's real numbers were so they could call them and chat with random people of the opposite sex.

Since this was approximately 1977 and there was no internet, well, it seemed pretty cool for the few days it lasted.

Re:

[ari_j]

That is the coolest thing I have read all day.

Re:

[Rob T Firefly]

Back in the early days of cheap three-way calling (or overly-complex beige boxing) a common phone prank was to conference two random numbers and stay quiet, let the targets speak to each other, and revel in the resulting "Who is this?" "You called me!" "No, you called me!" chaos. A variation on this was to three-way a target with movie theater recordings, error message recordings, or the good old speaking clock.
 
On the off-chance that was me calling your job... ha-ha!

Re:

[ajs318]

Whilst Asterisk (especially in conjunction with a Grandstream Handytone ATA and a voice modem with ALSA drivers) is in most respects the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on", you cannot spoof caller ID with it. The only known way of spoofing caller ID (without the assistance of a telco) is for you to be on a Strowger exchange (i.e. non-DTMF) and the person on the far end still to have one of the first-generation Cable TV phones with caller ID (which used DTMF tones sent between the ringin

Re:

[cduffy]

Even if you have your own PRI, you get allocated (or can buy) a block of 30 numbers to go with it. You can assign any of those thirty numbers as the visible ident on any of your thirty B-channels, even to all of them at once; but if you try to assign a number that isn't yours to one of your lines, then it won't work -- it will come up on the far end's telephone as "number withheld". This all happens transparently and you do not receive any error messages.

Time Warner Telecom only implemented this correctly w

TiiIIiiiMMmme is on my side...

[Recovering Hater]

yes it is! Oh, wait...

Don't pick up that phone

[Applekid]

TFA:

One upside: AT&T says doing away with time would enable the creation of about 300,000 new phone numbers in California beginning with the 853 or 767 prefixes.

Great, just what I need if I get one of those new numbers: questions about what time is it. Yes, my refridgerator is also running and there's no need to catch it, either.

Re:

[OldeTimeGeek]

Wasn't that 867-5309 (and no, I don't want to go into why I remembered it without looking it up)?

From TFA...

[amccaf1]

Although not immediately related to the subject at hand, I found this interesting:

By far the most prominent time lady was Jane Barbe, who succeeded Moore at Audichron in the 1960s. A former big band singer, Barbe (pronounced "Barbie") went on to become the voice of recorded telephone messages in the 1970s and '80s in the United States and elsewhere.

Along with her interpretations of the time and current temperature, Barbe delivered the bad news too, telling you that circuits in a specific area were busy, please try again later, or that your call cannot be completed as dialed.

And who will ever forget her heartbreaking rendition of "I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service"?

Barbe died of cancer-related complications in 2003 at age 74. It's estimated that at the height of her fame, Barbe's voice was heard worldwide about 40 million times a day.

I'm going to be freaked out the next time I hear that voice and realize that -- like that old lady in the episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE -- I'm hearing a voice from the grave...

No disrespect to the dead meant...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

But we used to call her the "Bell Bitch"

Re:

[LMacG]

There used to be a website with a bunch of the "Bell System" recorded announcements. Unfortunately, I just checked my bookmark and got a 404 for the subpage, and just a parked domain notice for the site. Guess I should have saved them when I could.

Re:

[calibanDNS]

You might want to check to see if a copy of the page exists at the Internet Archive [archive.org].

Re:

[smellsofbikes]

Although, to be fair, you do that every time you see an old movie. I think it's creepier to see pinup shots of Marilyn Monroe hanging in old guys' garages. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.

Re:

[businessnerd]

Here's my personal favorite...

I'm sorry, the fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, mash the keypad with your palm now.

Jacking Into The Matrix

[Marc_Hawke]

"anxiously awaiting the arrival of its cousin: The Pay-Phone."

That's gonna make escaping Agent Smith just THAT much harder.

Ehhh...

[LynnwoodRooster]

It was all relative, anyway...

Re:

[Minwee]

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Advanced Technology

[nairnr]

Whoa, we must have been ahead of the curve. We used to get Time AND Temperature!!!

What ended the AT&T time service

[MtViewGuy]

The thing that finally made the AT&T time service over telephone lines obselete was the dramatic reduction in the cost of small clocks that allow you to pick up the 60 kHz WWVB time signal. In fact, you can get wristwatches around US$40 that can do that now (I have a Casio wrist watch that does this).

Maybe its time has come

[crgrace]

I remember POP-CORN quite fondly. It was the only way to reset your clocks after a power outage if you didn't have a wind-up or battery powered watch/clock you trusted. My friends and I used to play the lamest game when we were in elementary school. We would dial POP-CORN and try to time it so the voice would say "exactly". It was a timing thing. Instead of saying "three forty-two and twelve seconds", to hear it say "three forty-three exactly" was a real score! Ah, the early 80s.

And yet

[simong]

In the UK, we got a new speaking clock earlier this year [channel4.com]. It's been sponsored for more than twenty years too.

Re:And yet ....BEEP BEEP BEEP...

[Anonymous Monkey]

The UK needs to have a speaking clock. How else would Ford Prefect be able to crash evil corporations in space.

Re:

[rpjs]

I thought it was the speaking clock somewhere in Australia that he patched them through to. IIRC the BBC TV version played a little snippet that went something like "At the third stroke it will be [whatever], just enough time to crack open another tinnie."

Re:

[Anonymous Monkey]

I live in the US, so read the book. In the book he patches into the London speaking clock.

What is the #

[jshriverWVU]

Not sure how this service works. Know when I was very little back in the 80's you could call a number (thought bank) and it would have an automated time/weather. Seems like every city in the area had their own version of that. Is this the same thing? Or is there a centralized number for everone in the US to use in each timezone?

"At the tone..."

[spaceyhackerlady]

My main time reference at home is a WWVB clock.

In the field I use GPS for accurate (atomic clock accurate, in fact) time. If I have a shortwave radio with me I use WWV. WWV's audio feed is on 303 499 7111, which can be useful. Sometimes, for the hell of it, I'll dial WWVH on 808 335 4363 instead. I have both as contacts in my cellphone. Sad or what?

Aloha!

...laura, with many temporal options

my kid

[bcrowell]

My seven-year-old daughter had never heard it. I read the LA Times article this morning, dialed the number nostalgically for myself, and then went and explained it to my daughter. She had all these questions, like "By the time they say what time it is, isn't it already over?" and "Do they do it every second?" I had imagined that it was just part of our universally shared culture, but it was obviously a completely foreign concept to her. I dialed it for her and had her listen. She listened and smiled at me indulgently.

Re:

[Aladrin]

Sounds like you got a bright one there. I'm impressed that those were her first questions.

You are, of course, teaching her to repair PCs, put ends on Cat5, and program in multiple languages... Right?

My niece would say 'nuh uh' first (because my father's 'teasing' includes a lot of outright lying) and then ... I have no idea. I don't think she'd ask anything. She would probably run to tell her mother about it. (She's 6.)

Only California and Nevada left?

[fo0bar]

I'm 99% sure that there are many local/regional/national telcos left that still provider time and weather. I'm guessing that they mean California and Nevada are the only states left that have dedicated entire prefixes for time and weather. FYI, the article didn't mention it, but Northern Nevada (everything but Vegas) uses 775-844-xxxx, traditionally 775-844-1212. I'm not sure about Southern Nevada (area code 702).

So why is AT&T completely getting rid of time & weather in California? The article

Re:

[King_TJ]

That's what I was thinking too. I live in St. Louis, Missouri - and I don't recall *ever* having some number to dial, sponsored by AT&T, that would read off the time? Maybe I was just ignorant of it? But even as a small kid, the numbers I recall were [phone] (for time and temperature), and [phone] (for a detailed weather report). The first used to be sponsored by the now defunct "Boatmen's Bank", and the latter was run by KMOX AM 1120 radio.

Our "time and temperature" number continued on

Re:

[Detritus]

Years ago, many telephone companies replaced the analog/mechanical drum machines with digital machines that used ROMs to store digitized voice samples. No moving parts to wear out.

The local telephone company used to dedicate entire exchanges to time (844-XXXX) and weather (936-XXXX). Not that long ago, someone decided that it was a waste to use a whole exchange for one service, and changed them into normal 7-digit numbers, freeing up the other numbers in the exchange for other uses.

does anyone use that?

[joeldg]

I mean..
just look at your cell phone..
or your watch..
or look up at almost any wall.. ..

Re:

[CompMD]

That would be a great solution if it weren't for the oft overlooked fact that over 90% of America is rural. How are those of us in "flyover states" going to get the time?

Re:

[Carbonite]

Don't worry, I'm sure that newfangled "watch" invention will find its way to rural America in due time.

Now what number will chics use?

[s31523]

What number will chics who you ask for their number use as their "real" number? Thanks AT&T, maybe we will have a chance to get their real phone numbers now!

Not dead yet!

[p_trekkie]

Actually, the US Naval Observatory [navy.mil], which maintains the official time for the US still has the voice announcer available over the phone. According to this page [navy.mil] the numbers are
[phone] and [phone]
for Washington DC and
[phone]
for the alternate master clock in Colorado Springs, CO.

The payphone? NEVER!

[MadFarmAnimalz]

The payphone will never be obsolete so long as we have Superman.

Re:

[rishistar]

What about the TARDIS? Payphone and time machine in 1!

headlines

[SolusSD]

What is with headlines these days?? Just in the past couple of days i've seen headlines with the word "terror" (in quotes) just because someone quoted in the story used the word terror, and now "AT&T Stops 'Time'"? I realize headlines must be attention grabbing but this is a little ridiculous.

US Naval Observatory Master Clock

[rkhalloran]

202-762-1401 & 202-762-1069 (Washington DC), 719-567-6742 (Colorado Springs CO); the audio track from WWV.

Ah, memories...

[Reality Master 101]

I was just thinking about this the other day for some reason!

One memory I have from youth is taking my oh-so-new-and-cool digital watch and carefully synchronizing it exactly to the beep when I called time. :)

Of course, later I synced my watch one day to the atomic clock, and then for some reason decided to check it against 853-1212. Imagine my geek outrage when freakin' Time was FORTY SECONDS OFF. I felt like an idiot for carefully syncing my watch all that time.

*sigh* another naive belief of youth falls. ("I mean, it's the phone company, of course they'd carefully ensure that 853-1212 has the exact time to the millisecond!")

Pay phones have their uses

[porcupine8]

I hope pay phones don't go completely extinct. I would have been royally screwed a couple months ago without one - I managed to lock myself out of my house with no keys, cel phone, or cash. I did have my wallet, though, so I could go to a 7-11, buy a prepaid phone card, and call my husband from a pay phone. Otherwise I would have had to break a window to get inside. (Now I have spare keys hidden in the car - I'd actually gone to make them that day but got there a half hour after the hardware store closed.)

Oh come now

[Adambomb]

anxiously awaiting the arrival of its cousin: The Pay-Phone

At the same time as the new Communications and Multimedia Pay-Per-Usage Access Points are brought in!

I doubt we'll ever see a complete removal of pay-per-use communications points, especially in captive audience type areas.

So just call NIST instead

[laing]

303-499-7111 (or tune your shortwave receiver to any one of the internationally allocated standard carrier frequencies of 2.5, 5, 10, 15, or 20 megahertz).

Lost Motorist or Weary Hiker?

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

Actually, the service had already stopped in most states, but Nevada and California -- with their large rural and unmapped areas -- were still holding out, should the lost motorist or weary hiker need to know the time of day.

I am lost in the uncharted areas of California or Nevada and the most important thing I need to know is the time? Are these hikers and lost motorists navigating with a sextant?

If I have access to a phone to call the time, shouldn't I be able to call for help?

Re:

[drsquare]

How does everyone set their clocks without calling time?

Teletext.

Re:How do you set your clocks?

[Sunburnt]

How does everyone set their clocks without calling time?

From my cell phone, like I imagine most folks do. Heck, I hardly see anyone my age (late 20's) or younger wearing watches anymore for that same reason.

Re:

[Deep Penguin]

Yes... well... I wear a wrist watch while carrying a cellphone, among other reasons, because I have to change the battery in my watch every 24 months, whereas my phone can't last as long as a week between charges. Also, there are places I go where there is no cell service (some rural areas in the Midwest, subbasements where signals can't reach, Antarctica, etc.), or is forbidden (airplanes in flight). I'm sure someone will tell me to buy a new phone, but the one I have doesn't provide the time unless it's

Re:How do you set your clocks?

[nairnr]

All of the phones I have every had sync themselves up with the provider. Even when traveling around, it will pick up the local time without any intervention...

Re:

[twiddlingbits]

I had a Sprint phone that would not recognize it was in Arizona in the Summer. AZ in the Summer is the same as West Coast time (AZ doesn't "Spring forward") so my cell time was off by an hour. The cell company swore to me that was not possible. Other folks on the network had the right time, and my phone was set to Network for time.

Re:

[Sunburnt]

I was about to say, "What, you mean like a regular watch," but then I remembered that I never have to set the time on my cell phone as long as I'm within anyone's network, so I guess it's not really a problem.

Re:

[jandrese]

Go to Options->Date/Time and change the "Date/Time Source" field from Blackberry to Network.

It's a bird! It's a plane!

[ColdWetDog]

How does everyone set their clocks without calling time? Lacking pulling out the shortwave radio and tuning to WWV, wasn't this the only low latency high accuracy clock easily accessible from home? (Key words low latency)

Your wristwatch?

Re:

[Bake]

I have my mobile phone automatically sync its clock to the one from the network.

Re:How do you set your clocks?

[glpierce]

Try this: http://www.time.gov/ [time.gov]

Re:

[Cro Magnon]

Doesn't work from work. I get message about firewall or Java settings. :-P

Re:

[dcollins]

Actually, I go to http://www.time.gov/ [time.gov] .

Re:

[quantum bit]

Sundial.

Re:

[rubycodez]

when I tried to use mine for DST at about 2:00am it was malfunctioning, the dark shadow was smeared all over the dial

Re:

[quantum bit]

Well, maybe I'll just have to give him a watch that syncs wirelessly with ntp for Christmas this year.

Seems like a huge waste of effort to require wireless networking and ntp to sync the time, when clocks that sync using shortwave or GPS radio signals are cheap, reliable, and readily available.

Re:

[Richy_T]

I hear that many Americans don't have maps. Such as.

Rich

Re:

[Boogaroo]

Great, what's the number? It's toll free right?
That can't be the right time. It's still daylight!
And what's with the funny accent on that line? Oh, can we get Sean Connery to do the readings? :)