Talk:Picturephone

Assumed conventions
Space Station V is clearly an international project, probably engineered mostly by a technical design agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, and governed by an international - possibly UN-urged - agreement on the market, social, legal and customs arrangement to be followed by those participating in the station. Therefore, it would not make sense to integrate the station's telecommunications into the system of any one country on Earth, nor would it be efficient to have separate communications sectors on board.

For this reason, the station would likely be issued its own country code, or would be part of a country code handling all telephone traffic in the vicinity of Earth but not on Earth itself (Station V, the Moon, any other permanent installations). This way, all nations' telephone customers must make an international call to the station, and all nations are an international call from the station.

As the majority of nations probably use the same prefix code for international calling, this code would probably be used by the station, even though one of the two main engineer countries - the USA - uses something different. Truthfully, in 1968, international dialing was unknown in the United States and no code had been put into use, though the 011 code might have been chosen for eventual use in this manner. Most countries had different codes through the 1970s and 1980s (France was 16 or 19, Spain was 07, Australia was 0011, Soviet Union was 8-10, Britain was 010, etc.), but in the 1990s, standardization began to progress. Many still do not use 00, but most do; North America is standardized on 011. At the time the novel and screenplay were written, Arthur Clarke may have imagined a common international code for this purpose, or regarded it as an unimportant detail; what the actor dialed may have been a director's notion.

To hopefully blend what appeared on screen with what is actually in effect in the first decade of the 21st century, I assumed that the dominant code, 00, is not required on the station; rather, one simply dials the country code and number. Calls within the station (or the station's country code) might be dialed as 0 plus the digits of a relatively short number (the international standard required would be a minimum of seven - a three-digit country code and a four-digit local number -- two-digit country codes are no longer assigned since 1972). Depending on the future growth of interplanetary population, it may eventually be necessary to dial 00 to call Earth from the station, or ALL calls from ALL points to ALL points would be dialed as country code + number, even to call next door, the latter already a situation in much of the US and Canada (dialing 10 or 11 digits). GCapp1959 16:55, August 28, 2010 (UTC)