why are the # s on a phone the opposite of a calculator?

Answer 1

I had a short story published once about this. It was about a guy at work that had to use a calculator a lot and also dial the telephone a lot. He kept getting them confused so he would dial wrong numbers a lot. It was called "Pushbutton Panic" and it was published in a magazine.

Answer 2

#1,. Why are calculator keypads and telephone keypads laid out differently?
Keyboards first appeared on calculators well over a century ago and I don't believe anyone knows for sure how the 9 at the top became a standard, but they were clearly set in their ways long before touch tone phones appeared. My best guess is that Felt set the de facto standard with the Comptometer 1887 and this model was so wildly successful that everyone copied it.
Older calculators were set using levers but some machines had 9 at the top and others at the bottom. (For example, compare the Burkhardt and Odhner pictures, However, if you look at all the keyboarded models, you'll see that they are consistent with current designs.)

Touch tone telephones are much more recent and according to AT&T/Bell documents, they were designed that way to be closer to dial phones which had 1, 2, 3 at the top of the dial and because testing showed that people made fewer dialing errors that way. (Which, of course, may be caused by the former reason.)

#2, Why is the telephone touch-tone key pad arranged differently from the calculator key pad?
A theory we have often heard is that the phone company intentionally reversed the calculator configuration so that people who were already fast at operating calculators would slow down enough to allow the signals of the phone to register. It's a neat theory, but it isn't true. Even today, fast punchers can render a touch-tone phone worthless.

Both the touch-tone key pad and the all-transistor calculator were made available to the general public in the early 1960s. Calculators were arranged from the beginning so that the lowest digits were on bottom. Telephone keypads put the 1-2-3 on the top row. Both configurations descended directly from earlier prototypes.

Before 1964, calculators were either mechanical or electronic devices with heavy tubes. The key pads on the first calculators actually resembled old cash registers, with the left row of keys numbering 9 on top down to 0 on the bottom. The next row to the right had 90 on top and 10 on the bottom, the next row to the right had 900 on top, 100 on the bottom, and so on. All of the early calculators were ten rows high, and most were nine rows wide. From the beginning, hand-held calculators placed 7-8-9 on the top row, from left to right.

Before the touch-tone phone, of course, rotary dials were the rule. There is no doubt that the touch-tone key pad was designed to mimic the rotary dial with the "1" on top and the 7-8-9 on the bottom. According to Bob Ford, of AT&T's Bell Laboratories, a second reason was that some phone-company research concluded that this configuration helped eliminate dialing errors. Ford related the story, which may or may not be apocryphal, that when AT&T contemplated the design of their key pad, they called several calculator companies, hoping they would share the research that led them to the opposite configuration. Much to their chargin, AT&T discovered that the calculator companies had conducted no research at all. From our contacts with Sharp and Texas Instruments, two pioneers in the calculator field, it seems that this story could easily be true.

It has also been suggested that if the lower numbers were on the bottom, the alphabet would then start on the bottom and be in reverse alphabetical order, a confusing setup. This might have entered AT&T's thinking, particularly in the "old days" when phone numbers contained only five digits, along with two exchange letters

Answer 3

I'm not completely sure.... but I THINK it has something to do with ten-keying vs reading. The digits on a phone are as we read them left to right and top to bottom. That's how we read, so it makes sense to do it that way.

People who use calculators to ten-key things in (like cashiering, accountants, stuff like that) may find it easier to have the higher numbers on top because it you need a larger number, you would work your way up from bottom (small numbers) to top (large numbers)..... much like working your way up.

Again, I don't know why they do this. It's probably because of how often the numbers are used. Like on a computer keyboard, our letters aren't a to z, they are in order of which is used the most in the English language. The ones used most are in the center.

Anyway, I find it very easy to ten-key things in on a calculator or an adding machine because I am used to using the keys where they are.

Hope this helps. Sorry if I confused you any.

Answer 4

I suspect but do not know that perhaps the manufacturers did not want to pay for the patent.