If you make a lot of phone calls, this one's for YOU! Many telephones incorporate a quick-dial feature that allows the caller to program the phone with ten or more frequently dialed numbers. A useful function, but very limited. If you are on a telephone committee for a club, church, or other civic organization, you may be dialing many numbers over and over every week. A pocket phone dialer might help, but they are still limited in memory and rather expensive. Why spend money when you already own a Commodore?
This program is not a terminal program for your modem. In fact, it doesn't even need a modem. Desktop Dialer is a computerized phone directory that outputs TouchTone frequencies to your monitor's speaker. The program is 100% compatible with the C-64 and 128 in either mode. After loading and running the program, just follow the instructions. Telephone numbers may include all symbols on a standard telephone keypad including # and *. Numbers may be input with or without punctuation. The number 1 (800) 555-1212 will work just as well as 18005551212. The program ignores spaces, parentheses, and dashes.
Simply choose the number to dial, pick up the phone, hold the mouthpiece near your monitor's speaker, and press Return. The computer then dials the phone. Please note that your telephone system must support tone dialing, and the phone you use with the program must be set to tone dial mode.
The program lets you save a directory of up to 20 names and numbers in a sequential disk file. You may save as many different directories to disk as you like. One directory could be for your user's group, another for business associates, and so on.
It may be necessary to initially experiment with the volume of the monitor. Time and Temperature numbers are excellent for testing purposes. During my own tests, I received those annoying "number disconnected or no longer-in-service" messages when my monitor's volume was too low. The Dialer works flawlessly with my phone system in both the C-64 and 128 modes. If, however, you have trouble dialing after experimenting, you might try varying the speed of the tones. This is easily accomplished by changing the values in the delay loops at lines 590 and 610. Have fun dialing, Desktop Dialer 64/128 is sure to let your fingers do a lot less walking when making those long lists of calls!
