Years ago pulse (rotary) and tone(dial pad)phone would work on the same telephone company circuits, Is this still true? Do telephone company lines still support pulse dialing phones in 2008?
Yes, they do.
All the fancy modern digital switches on the POTS network still support pulse dialing. I believe it’s even an FCC requirement. If you’ve got a touch-tone with a mechanical switchhook, you can still pulse-dial by hitting the switch rapidly in succession. (E.g. to dial a five, hit the switch five times rapidly, then wait a little bit. Zero is ten pulses.) Try it out.
A friend of mine loves antiques. She did her whole kitchen this way, so I got her a genuine antique telephone for Christmas. Kind with the mouthpiece mounted on the box on the wall, with the earpiece separate hung up on the side. Was literally 100 years old. Had capacitors and various circuits inside it. Plugged it in and called it, rang, picked it up, worked fine!
You can also go really old-fashioned and have the operator dial the number for you. People who are blind or have other handicaps that would make it difficult to dial a phone can sign up with the phone company to have their calls dialed for no additional charge–otherwise it costs you these days.
The dial phone in my kitchen (installed 1972) still works fine.
Mine works fine, too. A standard black desk model, I got it in 1984, found stickers inside that indicated it was manufactured in 1963, so it was rewired to accommodate a modular jack before I bought it.
At work, I attached a 1930-ish rotary phone to one of the digital system lines. Still was able to dial out and receive calls.
Amazing! I always wondered about that. However, could you crank it up and get an operator?
I’ve a working rotary phone I wired into my home’s phone system myself.
They better still work, otherwise why am I paying a separate charge for “touch tone service?”
Seriously, my Bell Canada land line account still has a separate charge of, I don’t know a couple of bucks a month maybe, for “touch tone service.”
Fuckwads.
I believe federal law in the U.S. gives one the right to use a rotary phone. I know at least several companies are obligated by federal law to be able to accept calls from rotary phones and have their phone systems setup to deal with the callers who don’t have touch tone (DTMF) service.
Dad, is that you?
I’ve got a wood wall phone, and while I can crank it to ring its own bell, there’s nothing at the phone company’s end to sense and respond to my cranking.
If you had a dial phone, you were on an automatic exchange with no operators standing by ready to say “Number, please!” when you wanted to place a call.
The phone company, I’ve heard, takes a dim view of users injecting their own alternating current on the line. To get the operator’s attention, you’re better off repeatedly and rapidly lifting and dropping the hook.
Funny, I was thinking the same thing! My father still has the same phone number from 1958; he had an old wall-mounted dial phone in the kitchen at least until the late 80’s, if not longer.
IIRC, they got rid of that in the US a few years ago.
Yes, if you make ten pulses with the hook, it would be like dialing “0”.
I was an operator until 2005, and while I don’t think anyone used a phone quite that old, there were quite a few people who still used rotary phones. Often, they would be elderly, and they would call us because they were having trouble getting through on some company’s touch tone menu. We couldn’t be much help, though, because our equipment didn’t make touch tones, either.
Sometimes, the person insisted they did have a touch tone phone. Many phones (especially back in the days when you had to pay extra for touch-tone service, which is apparently still the case in Canada) have a switch on them which allows the buttons to either send the tones for touch-tone or pulses (they sound like clicks) like a rotary dial. These people had their phones set to “pulse”, which works fine for making calls, but terrible for automated menus.
My brother bought one of those “antique” phones that others have described - crank on the side, mouthpiece mounted on the front. However, I called it “antique” because it just looked as such and definitely did not work like the genuine ones on “Lassie” when Timmy fell down the well. The real killer of its having any antique flair was the “rotary dial” which was actually a circular touch tone keypad. I was able to find an old rotary dial which I substituted for the electronic one. Still I managed to wire in the modern keypad in an enclosed drawer type section of the phone.
Yes, my story actually has a point. I found it interesting that it is possible to dial part of a number, then use the keypad, and go back to the rotary dial and so on. Oh, and it really makes the call after you’ve done all that alternating back and forth.
Remember the good old days when you could dial your own number,hang up, and the phone would ring?
When I was a kid we knew a particular number that if you dialled it and hung up, your phone would ring a few seconds later. The usual rumour was that it was suppposed to be used by phone technicians to see if a phone repair had worked. It was also taken as read that if anyone from the Phone Company had caught us kids using it we’d be in Big Trouble. It was a very very secret number. The number was mfrl grphle mmblbe…