Posted on 05/21/2024 10:19:32 AM PDT by DallasBiff
The rotary dial phone was once the be all and end all of the telephones. Like the cellphone of today, everybody had one, and they ruled domestic communications for decades.
But that all changed in the 1980s when they were supplanted by a new upstart, push-button telephones. Their days were numbered (pun intended).
Many born after the 1990s have likely never seen one, which is a shame. But for those who do remember, join us as we take a trip back in time in remembrance of this glorious piece of telecommunications history.
(Excerpt) Read more at interestingengineering.com ...
Originally you could get any color phone you want so long as it was black, until the princess slimline phone came out.
I don’t see why people keep saying that phones ring when they don’t. And what’s this “hang up” business, anyway? Hang it up on what?
finally - something that will break the millenials.
I was on a party line as a child.
These are funny. But it’d be just as funny to have someone transfer a call using that old operator machine with people under 70.
and if there was ever a problem, a very skilled (and vetted) maintenance tech would show up and make it all work again, at no additional charge.
You could bludgeon an intruder to death and not even crack the case. A bit of rubbing alcohol and a paper towel and they were as good as new.
fl8r
Push button phones were around before the 80s. I remember using them at a relative's house in the early 70s, and they were quite common by the late 70s.
Into the 1960s my grandmother didn’t have a dial phone. You just picked it up and told the operator the number that you wanted to be connected with. She had a 3 digit number. My other grandmother was on a party line, with a unique ring pattern for each number on the line.
The handset had phenomonal sound. That big carbon disk was super. Thank Edison. Oh, is he now a carbon criminal?
until the 1970s, we also had unwanted “party lines” courtesy of Ma Bell - for 2 years we shared a line with an old lady who lived around the block. She would listen to our calls, and we could hear her breathing and chewing her dentures.
It drove my teen sisters crazy, who were on the line talking with their friends about school and boys, to have Mrs. Samson on the other end.
Totally indestructible. We had the same phone in the kitchen for decades.
You can buy old refurbished ones; the people who restore old phones can put pulse to tone converters in, rig them to work with VOIP services, etc.
There was almost never a problem with these phones. We had ours for about 30 years.
They really screwed up when designing the push button phones. They reversed the order of the numbers compared to adding machines.
Pretty reliable operation all the way around. No wonder the commies had to carve it up.
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