Direct mail is a broad term that includes the following types of mailed promotions: Institutional direct mail serves to promote the name of the publishing house with no reasonable expectation of sales revenues.
touch (Unix) touch is a standard Unix command-line interface program which is used to update the access date and / or modification date of a file or directory. In its default usage, it is the equivalent of creating or opening a file and saving it without any change to the file contents.
Before the touch-tone phone, of course, rotary dials were the rule. There is no doubt that the touch-tone key pad was designed to mimic the rotary dial with the 1 on top and the 7-8-9 on the bottom. According to Bob Ford, of AT&T's Bell Laboratories, a second reason was that some phone-company research concluded that this configuration helped eliminate dialing errors.