50 Years of STD
Who’d believe that it’s 50 years since the first national direct dial phone call was made. Prior to December 1958, if you wanted to call long distance in the UK, you’d have to go through an operator – and to get the billing right, the operator would write down your details in longhand. The Queen made that first historic call from Bristol to Edinburgh in 1958, and there’s a video clip on the BBC website
Not having been alive in the 50s I had no idea about this anniversary.. It’s the sort of thing I take for granted so it’s nice to pause for a second and think about life before it was the norm.
(I have to say the headline threw me for a second, I was thinking of an entirely different STD!)