A vertical service code or VSC is a special code dialed prior to (or instead of) a telephone number that engages some type of special telephone service or feature. Typically preceded with an asterisk, or * (star), key on the touch tone keypad and colloquially referred to as star codes, most are two digits in length; as more services are developed, those that use 2 or 3 as the first digit are sometimes three digits in length.
In North American telephony, VSCs were developed by AT&T Corp. as Custom Local Area Signaling Services or CLASS codes (sometimes LASS) in the 1960s and 70s. Their use became ubiquitous throughout the 1990s and eventually became a recognized standard. As CLASS was an AT&T trademark, the term "vertical service code" was adopted by the North American Numbering Plan Administration. The use of the word "vertical" is a somewhat dated reference to older switching methods and the fact that these services can only be accessed by a local telephone subscriber, going up (or vertically) inside the local central office instead of out (or horizontally) to another telephone company.
Read more about Vertical Service Code: List of Vertical Service Codes
Famous quotes containing the words vertical, service and/or code:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a sock in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.”
—George Bernard Shaw (18561950)