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 ...
So was my family, we had a 3-party line phone and not the kind of party line where they charge you by the minute to have some sleezy woman talk dirty to you.
The quick dial time for numbers close to 1 make area codes with low values highly sought after and ‘elite’.
Like NY 212.
Doesn’t matter anymore with push buttons.
Area codes have largely become meaningless. A mobile phone’s area code tells where it was issued, but not where it is now or where the owner now lives.
A rotary phone should be easy to figure out within a minute or so.
“They made excellent improvised weapons. 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.”
Says the “Harmless Teddy Bear”.
LOL!!!!
This was done by using one transistor driving two separate resonant circuits in parallel. As long as everything stayed linear, this was allowed by the superposition principle.
What kept everything linear was that the inductors in each of the oscillators were designed to saturate; this is what kept one resonant circuit from "hogging all the gain" from the transistor; this would prevented the other tone from being generated.
This was during the relatively short time that transistors were more expensive than inductors.
This just one of the things about the old analog phone system that were very clever. Bell Labs, which was the source of much of this cleverness, employed literally the best scientists and engineers in the world.
When the American phone system needed something done, Bell Labs would literally invent technology that would change the world forever. They did this more than once.
As an EE, I thought the one-transistor DTMF generator showed such an impressive level of creativity and insight into the thing I liked best at that age, which was creative circuit design.
My parents had my grandmother’s rotary phone. The “number” was in the center of the dial and I still remember it:
“CLaiborne 1-7762”
The ‘1776’ bit seemed cool to me when I was young.
Along with stick shifts, the most effective anti-theft devices around.
I really miss the sound quality - and the fact that even with a power outage, you still had a phone for emergency (as long as a pole wasn’t knocked down :-)
my number was JE4-2822
We were ‘APpleton’.
True. “Touch Tone” dialing was common place technology well before the 70’s came to a close.
We switched over to push button phones in the early 1970’s, they were already around in certain places by the mid to late 1960’s.
When I was a kid, I learned that the “clicks” when you dial coincide with the number. I also learned you could “click” the cradle hook and “dial” a number using clicks and pauses.
They worked by creating ‘clicks’ the rotating bar analog switches could ‘hear’. Each rotation back to “O” ‘told’ the switch the digit based on the clicks back to “O”. These old switches could accommodate 3 to 7 digit dialing with no issues. It took the newer versions to to handle 1+ 10 digit dialing. Otherwise the operator had to connect an interexchange (long distance) call.
People knew their local exchange name. We were Elgin and then Pelham. You could ‘dial’ 4 digits within the exchange to call a neighbor or 7 digits to call another local exchange. Thus we were 0178 and 5550, respectively.
I, too, was easily impressed, but for a slightly different tech. It was a Vicmodem getting 300 baud so I could dial up a terminal BBS with my Commodore-64. I thought that was the neatest thing as a 15-year-old. LOL
That was not the reason and you need to look that case up. ATT was withholding a lot of technology. After the breakup Cell phone service exploded. Look MCI vs ATT, that case went for about 13 years in court.
Probably depends on the exact area of the country. I’m just turning 70 this year and the most antiquated thing I remember is the “party line”. And as kids, calling the operator to ask what time it is lol.
So to me it's amazing why so many 30-odd year olds claim they have no idea how to use one.
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