"The Daring Dufas" wrote in message
...

Phone equipment used to be sensitive to the polarity
of the circuit.

Dial phones are able to be used with reversed polarity but touch tone will
not be able to dial if you reverse the polarity.

Tip was for the old PBX switchboard where the center contact on the jack was
the tip, and the outer contact was the ring. I think the tip was the
negative pole of the circuit.

Octothorpe is the # symbol but the use of the term is not an official
designation for the symbol. The phone companies tend to call the * symbol
the star key, but there the standard name for the symbol is asterisk.


--

Roger Shoaf

About the time I had mastered getting the toothpaste back in the tube, then
they come up with this striped stuff.
I'll bet you don't know what "tip"
and "ring" means or how the terms came about. I also
like to mess with folks and tell them to press the
"octothourpe" button on the phone. There is a very
good explanation of home phone wiring on this website:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/phone_wiring.html

TDD