You can still call a phone number and be told the time by the U.S. Naval Observatory:
The U.S. Naval Observatory still sponsors a telephone number that will tell you the time and temperature when you call. Dial 202-762-1401 and you will get a recording of the time from the "Master Clock." Yes, a phone number to tell you what time it is. This concept is familiar if you grew up in the US during the first 90 years of the 20th century. And apparently, a few local numbers still exist.
[...] In 1963, Jane Barbe took over the role of "The Time Lady." Then, in 1983, Pat Fleet ("AT&T Lady") replaced Barbe, with Joan Daniels then replacing Fleet. The automated time service officially ended in 2007.
Click here for Pat Fleet's "Disconnected" or "No Long in Service Message." Click here for Jane Barbe's messages or here for Joan Daniels. The showman Dick Clark had a bit called Friday Night Surprise, and here is a video of Jane Barbe revealing her role in keeping people on time. In 1996, Ted Koppel interviewed Fleet and Barbe here.
It was common to call the "time phone number" and have Jane Barbe tell us the time when I was young (in our area, the phone number was TI4-1212, and incidentally the weather was got at WE6-1212), though my friend's father preferred to use WWV.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18, @07:15PM
You can call me any time (313)69696969 and get told to fuck you. ANY. TIME.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18, @07:52PM (1 child)
Now you go to https://www.time.gov/ [time.gov]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday December 18, @09:43PM
Kinda impersonal, isn't it?
And yes, as sad as this may sound, there were people calling the time number just to hear a human voice talk to them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18, @07:53PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Informative) by linuxrocks123 on Sunday December 18, @08:41PM
It's real.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18, @08:02PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Sunday December 18, @09:48PM (1 child)
and get the time to within 10-25 usec or msec, I forget. Assuming CDMA, as that's I've ever worked with.
I love it when I have to change the time and my phone says "9:42". Is that "9:42:02" or "9:42:58"?
Either way, odds are my microwave will be off by a minute half the time.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 19, @02:18AM
This way you can call the number and make sure both the USNO and your phone are working, or at least working in cahoots.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Monday December 19, @12:23AM
Where I was born there was a number too, a lady said "las 4 y 5 minutos" 4 and 5 minutes, no seconds. Then they changed the voice to a man's, he said "al oir el tono serán las 4 horas 5 minutos 30 segundos", but you called a 2 digits number for crying out loud, not that abomination 564-55-66-33-454-32-23-5-6-74555.
OT: when I was a kid I called the US, some number in a computer magazine maybe, I remember "the number you have reached (something something), please check the number and dial again or call your at&t operator for asistance." Memoriiiiiiiies.
(Score: 2) by anotherblackhat on Monday December 19, @01:04AM (1 child)
For a good time, call 202-762-1401
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 19, @02:20AM
Hey, that's another good number [bustle.com] to remember.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Monday December 19, @04:06AM (1 child)
I used to phone to get the weather all the time. I was pretty bummed when the number stopped working (in the last couple of years). This article prompted me to finally look it up. It turns out, they merely changed the number!
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/weather-general-tools-resources/telephone-services/recorded-observations-forecasts.html [canada.ca]
Sometimes this new system is hard to decipher. The old system was actually a guy making a recording of the forecast. Now it is a canned computer-generated voice reading a standardized set of variables.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday December 19, @05:15PM
Any airport that has a AWOS (the very low power computer transmitter of current weather) usually (always?) has a phone line attached in the USA:
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/weather/asos/ [faa.gov]
Obviously, it is not rocket surgery to figure out the weather at your takeoff airport but you can call the AWOS for your destination airport from the lounge or even from home to see if its even worth "getting serious" about planning a flight and filing a flight plan for reals.
I suppose like many things this is less popular in the smartphone/internet era.
Pilots use "real tools and systems" to flight plan for real, but if you're just casually considering the question of KMDW vs KORD vs "F it we're not flying to Chicago today" it works well enough.
This whole topic opens the mystery of METAR, where they're just turning METAR observations into canned speech. METAR was like a 1980s network packet format for weather used directly by humans LOL.