Short story about telephone network

[chrispenycate]

This is old.

I was having a conversation about sapience developing in machines with a guy at the monthly local SF meetup, and he was saying how, once upon a time it was always computers or robots who developed sentience, that the idea of a network, the web generally, achieving it was relatively recent.

I riposted with a story I had read back in the early sixties, but anthologised so possibly a good bit older, which started with all the telephones in the –world? – United States? ringing at the same time, and it turning out this was the birth cry of the telephone system achieving self consciousness (since telephone switching at the time was done with relays and uniselectors it would have been a very slow, ponderous intelligence. Unfortunately I have no idea of author, date of publication or title of the story, and Google hasn't recognised it for me, either.

Can anyone else remember reading this, or will I be forced to go back in time and write it myself?

 

[jojajihisc]

Dial F for Frankenstein by Arthur C. Clarke?

 

[chrispenycate]

Could well be, thank you. I read just about everything I could lay my hands on from Clarke, including the wind from the sun, and when I tried to Google it, it crashed my computer totally.

Just what one would expect from such an entity.

 

[petrosh1946]

Such a story was shown as part of a film on Ray Bradbury. The story was titled "Dial Double Zero." As far as I have been able to find out, it was never actually published, only shown in this film version.