As far as I know the GDR and Hungary also had the black-gray-red-code. Hungary also had aluminum wiring. Maybe Kent can tell us if that color code was also used in sweden.
I know the old British color code since I took apart a really old Tape recorder years ago. It was manufactured by Modern Techniques, no idea when. It had no plug, only bare wire ends and I tried to hook it up but didn't succed. No wonder when you try to connect the hot to the ground. However, no one got shocked and it was broken anyway. So I threw it to the dump. Never saw something like that again.
Maybe I'll tell something about phones in Austria. Now we have tonbe dial and a semi-digital system like most other countries, but since fall 2000 there was also the old system, based on pulse dial. Due to the fact that there were not enough phone wires in the streets in the 50ies or maybe even earlier our national phone company invented two kinds of phone connections. There was one, more expensive, where a customer had an own line and could call whenever he/she wanted. And there were parted lines, called "quarter accounts". 4 to 10 users shared one line and only one could talk. the phone had a button you had to press before dialing. If you got the dial tone you were lucky, if not, you had to wait. In suburban areas like the one i live in, the phone lines were built for one single-user connection per house, but in the late 80ies big appartment blocks for wealthy people were built who often had a single connection in every appartment, so the other people hardly ever got those connections. (My father applied for one for 10 years because he needed it for his business. He never got one. The lapidar answer by the post officer was: There are already five phones at that line. We cant't hook you up too. Wait for the change to digital system. We never figured out how they managed to hook up five single connections to one line, even with the help of a telecom worker.)
