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Growing up my home phone number was 4 digits for a local call, or at least so I was required to memorise it as a small child.

In the very late 90s I briefly had a rotary dial phone - very anachronistic even then - and discovered that dialling an eleven digit number that way is a huge ballache - it's so sloooow! Especially if the number has a bunch of 9s in it.

A little after that I was in the US but kept using my British mobile for a month or two as my contact - giving my number to people was even worse ... rattling off a 15 digit (international prefix plus country code) always confused people.

I too remember the Swap Shop number with some fondness. I certainly called it at least once or twice.

Last note - I realised recently that I still know the X29 address for nsfnet relay from Janet to the Internet (basically a Janet-to-telnet relay). That's a 14 digit number that I last used over 30 years ago. My memory's pretty average, but man, once stuff goes in it does not come out again!

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I can still remember four digit numbers for some of my school friends.

At the time there were two digit codes for neighbouring exchanges, however, these were not universal. For example, my parents phone was on exchange 'P' and the code to call my friends in town 'S' was 81. However, if I went to town 'G', the code for town 'S' was something completely different.

The new and longer prefixes were introduced in parallel to the convenient two digit short codes. I can't quite remember all of the lingo for what the new prefixes and systems were called, however, for the rotary dial phone, you did not have to dial all ten digits (or latterly eleven), as you obviously memorised the 2 + 4 numbers for all of your friends, and only needed to spend a brief amount of time waiting for that dial to tap out its special codes.

The 'Swap Shop number' was also used for early Crimewatch programmes and so much else. Jim'll Fix It was write-in only from what I remember, and I have a sister that wrote in to meet Kermit. She dodged a bullet there!

I didn't get to know X29 or nsfnet as well as you, at the time networking skills were tantamount to witchcraft voodoo. However, I remember JANET addresses being back to front. For example, I was at Plymouth where it was something like uk.ac.plymouth. We also had lots of different non-TCP/IP network standards going on with considerable skill needed to get files between SGI/Sun workstations, IBM workstations, IBM mini-computers, VAX VMS and those new-fangled PCs.

Kermit was the tool used for moving files around, and I am now wondering what happened to Kermit. Kermit has dropped out of the history books somewhat.

I guess FTP was the extinction event for Kermit ... and didn't Kermit itself kill off the various [XYZ]Modem protocols?

I too recall the reversed addresses. The transition from X29 to Internet fell in the middle of my university¹ education... we went from mostly Vax/VMS+JANET when I started to mostly Linux+Internet when I left (and the web had suddenly appeared too). There was an awkward bit in the middle where I was super keen to be on the internet (though my main interest was Usenet) and the nsfnet relay via PAD on the Vax was the only available intermediary. It's mildly interesting that the sole system I could connect to in this way to browse Usenet was Nyx which rather amazingly is still up. I assume they deleted my account at some point in the last 30 years though. It was unbearably slow anyway, so I gave up quite swiftly.

Fun times dimly remembered.

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¹Actually a Poly, uk.ac.pow when I arrived, but a Uni, glam.ac.uk when I left. It's changed name once or twice since then as well!