Re: Why were the star and pound symbols originally added to phone keypads?, in 1965–1966, my senior year in high school, my computer class (one of the first) used to go to Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, every other Saturday, to borrow their IBM 7094 (IBM’s top regular-production computer of the pre-360 era). On the desks there, they had 16-key phones, but, instead of A, B, C, D, the extra column was labeled with various cryptic signs, ⬨ (lozenge) being the only one I can remember after half a century.
I remember that during the 1970’s, Ma Bell was pushing to have everyone convert their rotary phones to touch-tone, or for new phone accounts at least. It was obvious to everyone by then that this was the coming thing.
But customers had to pay extra for a touch-tone account! And there was rather little incentive at the time, since rotary was what everyone was already familiar with, and there wasn’t much you could do with touch-tone phones like there is today.
I held off on getting a touch-tone phone for many years – until the early 1990’s as best I recall. Why would anyone care to pay extra each month for a fancy-schmancy new whiz-bang phone that (in those days) didn’t really add any useful functionality for most customers?
In the 1980s, Southwestern Bell tried to get rid of dial service. Originally, most of the phone system used pulse tones, so touch tone service had to be converted over to pulse service in order to work with the network. By 1980, this was reversed: The entire network used tones, and now the phone company had to convert the pulses from rotary dials into tones. SWB wanted to eliminate the surcharge for touch tone and make everyone get touch tone phones.
The Texas Public Utility Commission saw things differently. Since rotary service was cheaper, it was important for poorer consumers to still have that option. Even though SWB proposed eliminating the surcharge and replacing rotary phones with touch tone phones (they still rented almost all of the phones then), the PUC thought this was merely a ploy to get a higher rate by moving the touch tone surcharge to the base rate.
In the end, the phone company had to keep the rotary service, and even though rotary service (and the phones themselves) were more expensive, still had to offer them at a lower rate than the touch tone phones.
I don’t know if the phone companies still offer rotary service at all, and if they do, is it still cheaper than tone service. I do know that land line POTs phones are now about $100 per month, and it’s now cheaper to get TV, Internet, and a telephone from the local cable company than a plain ol’ POTs line from the telephone company.
$100? in San Diego AT&T who bought Pac Bell, who was formed as part of the AT&T breakup. Seems to offer phone service for $25 a month.
I seem to recall seeing my first TouchTone phone in the mid '60s. Say, '65.
And CenturyLink, which serves Colorado, offers POTS for as low as $20/month.
Around here, The Phone Company also tried to eliminate rotary dial support about 20 years ago. To sweeten the deal: The extra charge for touch tone would go away and they would give touch tone phones to those still with rotary ones.
No deal said the utilities commission. The extra fee for touch tone phones was being directed to subsidize poor/elderly customers so it had to be kept. Errgggh.
When we gave up our land line it was almost $30 a month after all fees and taxes. With no long distance service (which would have been $5 a month extra). We got around the later with various tricks and at the end were using Google Voice. $20-40 a month seems typical now, far from $100 a month.
We now average about $4 a month using VoIP. Same phone number, same phone (well, one of them is).
We have both rotary and touch tone phones here. $19.99/month for unlimited local and long distance with AT&T. I just can’t access the voicemail feature from the rotary phones, so it’s deactivated, and we use an answering machine. One of those cool clear ones that still uses the mini-cassette tape.