> Only tangentially connected if at all, but why oh why are the numbers laid out differently on telephones and calculators?
Oh, now you've done it. I used to sleep at nights but now I feel a bout of insomnia coming on at the thought of that one. When I read this I happened to have both on my desk. I can't think of a logical reason for the differences but the two evolved at different times. Calculators (in mechanical form) have been around since the 1960s (possibly even earlier) and I suppose the companies who manufactured the machines adopted their own standards for reasons similar to those by which the QWERTY standard was adopted in most (but not all) countries for typewriters (and now word-processors). I can but guess that those who used the earlier machines (cashiers, accountants etc.) approved of the bottom-up approach to number crunching on mechanical calculators and this practice was maintained when the calculator world went electronic.
Push button phones have only really been around for the past twenty years and I presume the position of the buttons are primarily for the benefit of those with poor sight. The logical sequence of numbers from top left to bottom right reflects the Western method of character reading. You may have noticed aswell, that there is a small raised dot in the centre of the number '5'. This aids the quick selection of numbers for poorly-sighted users and helps to distinguish numbers from extra buttons on extended key-pad phones.
