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.
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.
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.
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.
They really screwed up when designing the push button phones. They reversed the order of the numbers compared to adding machines.
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.
A rotary phone should be easy to figure out within a minute or so.
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.
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.
So to me it's amazing why so many 30-odd year olds claim they have no idea how to use one.