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I remember the ol' hand crank phones. Take the receiver off the hanger
and turn the crank for the number you were calling. 2 shorts/1 long or
some other combination. 
Posted on 01/22/2024 6:45:55 AM PST by Red Badger
Kids today: What's a 'dial'?......................
VIDEO AT LINK.......................
(Excerpt) Read more at twitter.com ...
Some places in SW Oregon still had four-digit phone numbers at least through 1976. Don’t know about party lines.
Topeka. I know it should be Wichita but the damn liberals have a stronghold in Topeka.
Don't forget the 3rd hand...
About the time that dial phones were on the wane and touch-tone phones were almost everywhere I heard a radio conversation about what or how to explain why we still used the term ‘dial the number’. Much humor ensued as several folks tries to address that. But the winnah was a dude who explained that ‘dial’ is still correct but it is now an acronym to wit:
D)igitally (as use your fingers(digits))
I)nitially
A)nalog
L)ink
Agreed. Going from horse-drawn carriages to trains (1840s) and then to airplanes by the end of that century was a huge leap forward. Someone who was born in the 1830s and lived until the 1920s would have witnessed the most rapid pace of technological advance ever.
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I remember the ol' hand crank phones. Take the receiver off the hanger
and turn the crank for the number you were calling. 2 shorts/1 long or
some other combination.
“The good old days and party lines.”
The first thing that came to mind was Grandma saying, “Myrtle, hang up that phone” to the nosy neighbor who would listen in on calls.
Found an old business card recently. The phone numbers had no area codes.
I have a 1955 pay phone.
The old radio shows - Dragnet for example - have beautiful examples of what it was like to make a long distance person-to-person call through multiple exchanges circa 1949. It was a really advanced system back then and the long distance to central office relays could days minutes or hours to complete the call.
But did you ever dial a number by tapping out the digits on the “hang up button”? This was a way that you could make a call even if the phone had one of those “dial locks” on it. (If you listened to the earpiece when you dialed a number you could hear the pace/cadence that the phone system expected the “taps” to be. If you could tap at that same speed, you could make a call!)
Winner! Winner!
See you later at the skating rink for some Centipede and pinball.
Yup; blue boxing.
“Where I used to live, to dial a local number all you had to do was dial 4 digits...”
Somewhere I have a business card that my father was given, in the DC suburbs, which had six digits (xx-xxxx).
And I’m old enough to remember when area code 301 covered the entire state of Maryland. Now they’re up to six, I think.
I see old movies that show phone numbers with mnemonics for the first two numbers..............
Never had to do that, but heard of it.................
Vertical hold.
You kids with your newfangled ‘dial telephone’ technology. Back in MY day, you used a telegraph, and you LIKED IT!
BTTT
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