I remember only being able to call certain relatives back east like in NYC once a month because they only got so many free calls and then they had to pay per call whether it was local or not
to last year’s remarks on landlines …we still have ours due to the social security admin and other social services not accepting cell numbers as valid phone numbers or as proof of residence until a couple of o f years ago …
But spectrum bundles it in with our cable internet… I think its 9.99 a month if you separate it
so if you want a landline
we get an actual non-junk mail call about twice a week
I find it faster and more convenient to grab a separate calculator (when I’m doing something requiring one, there’s generally one within arms’ reach) than to open an app and have it take up a chunk of my screen space. The calculator which does only that requires fewer clicks than hauling out my phone and working my way around to its calculator.
My 1790 farm house (which is still on a farm) is chockablock with discarded ideas made, well, not flesh, but wood and brick anyway. The original house consisted of what is called a 'two over two", two ‘parlors’ separated by a tiny front hall which also contained the narrow steep stair which wound around the central chimney to the other two rooms. In the back was probably originally a one-story with a second chimney, called the ‘keeping room’, where meals were cooked and eaten. Every room was heated by a large fireplace. At least a dozen children and related adults lived there at a time for much of the 19th century (the keeping room was early on replaced with a two story ell with a lot more sleeping area upstairs).
The road got electricity post WWII some time. Indoor plumbing came after that.
History continues to flow over the house. There was probably no central heat until the 1970’s – there were some decades when it was owned by retired people who only lived here in the summer. It was rented by the room to students after that, and wired for separate electric heaters. Then when the people we bought it from moved in they put in a boiler and radiators. We will eventually get solar voltaic panels and minisplits and take out the boiler.
The remains of the primeval forests cut down by the first European settlers are part of my house – the unpeeled logs serving as floor joists down in the stone cellar, the yellow pine and chestnut boards on the floors, some of them 18" wide.
In the '60s, I used to participate in sports car rallies, The “arrive at checkpoints on time” variety.
Several club members used the Curta for their calculations. I never had one, but I did have a large diameter circular slide rule that did the calculations. It couldn’t do anything else though while the Curta could be.
Almost certainly not. Before the breakup, AT&T was very strict about “unauthorized equipment” on their lines, their reasoning being it might screw up the whole network. Hell, Hush-A-Phone had to sue the FCC (and by extension, AT&T) to give users the right to put a rubber privacy guard on the mouthpiece.
FCC official Jack Werner’s suggestion was that the telephone company should suspend service to any consumer failing to comply with the regulation prohibiting foreign attachments.[31]
…
The FCC’s 1955 decision was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals on November 8, 1956, in the landmark case Hush-A-Phone v. United States , with the decision stating it was an “unwarranted interference with the telephone subscriber’s right reasonably to use his telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without becoming publicly detrimental”.[39]
When The Pentagon was built, starting in October 1941, the bathrooms and dining facilities were segregated. FDR insisted they be integrated.
The Pentagon was designed in accordance with the racial segregation laws in force in the state of Virginia at the time, with separate eating and lavatory accommodations for white and black persons; the sets of lavatories were side by side, and the dining areas for black persons were in the basement.[41][42] However, when Roosevelt visited the facility before its dedication, he ordered removal of the “Whites Only” signs, and the Pentagon became the only building in Virginia where segregation laws (which remained in force until 1965) were not enforced. The side-by-side sets of restrooms still exist, but are used by all.[42]
When I was four and we were living in Los Angeles milk was delivered by Carnation Dairy. We didn’t have a box, but a carrier rather like a soda six-pack only made of metal wire and scaled up to fit milk bottles.
For additions to the regular order we had a pack of cardboard cards that were fastened together with a rivet at one end and were color coded with an initial for the product. You’d swivel out what you wanted and stick the pack in the neck of an empty bottle so the milkman could see it from his truck and make only one trip.
White with a blue S was sour cream and the other one I remember was tan with a brown C – chocolate milk. Mom got a couple bottles of chocolate milk until she got the bill, and flagged the driver down the next time she saw him. “Why am I being charged for the chocolate milk?”
When I was in the navy I collected stamps because it was a more portable hobby than model railroading. I would buy a pound of stamps on paper from Mystic, soak them off, and sell the inevitable duplicates back to Mystic for store credit. I must have processed a thousand 8-cent Eisenhowers.
One afternoon when we were both off duty I was busy with my latest batch I mused aloud to my roommate, “I wonder where Mystic gets these?”
He was a person of faith and said, “Don’t you know? The church ladies save them and the church sends them in for money. My aunt’s done that for all her life.”
I held up one where the scissors had cut into the bottom of a stamp. “Tell your aunt to be more careful!” and we laughed as I tossed it into the trash basket.
Fifty-odd cameras at thirty-odd sites including a couple in the UK
They have a Youtube channel as well. One slogan they used for a short time some months ago was, Staying at home watching trains on our screens – we’ve been ready years for this.
Do they have the world-famous Tehachapi Loop? I used to go there from time to time to watch the trains go through. Someday I want to get together with some friends and rent a little airplane and fly over it.
Normal for some parts of the country perhaps. When I was a Cub Scout circa 1960 we went on a short excursion in the desert. This new kid from New Jersey took out a stick of gum, unwrapped it and put the stick in his mouth while tossing away the wrapper. The Den Mother – my mother – admonished, “Cub Scouts don’t litter!” and the kid looked startled then retrieved the trash and stowed it in his pocket.
Up until the mid-sixties or so when direct dial became almost universal in the US that’s how almost all long distance calls were made – you would call the long distance operator and ask to be connected to [name] in [city] along with their number if you had it. If there was a trunk line between your this connection was trivial to make but if not – frequently the case – the LD operator would call the rate-and-route operator who would figure out the trunk line(s) needed and the rate to be charged. The LD operator would then call the inward operator of the first trunk line, who would then call the next inward operator and so on until the local lines of wherever it was was reached where an operator would call [name] and announce, “Please hold for a call from [your name] in [your city].”
Needless to say, this process could take a while so rather than have you wait on the line, your LD operator would have you hang up and then some minutes later call you back to complete the connection. You might remember in It’s a Wonderful Life Mary waiting for a call from Sam Wainwright and it’s a minute after the phone rings before she’s talking to him with George listening in.
A friend of mine wrote a book on how the automated long distance system works – quite an engineering feat – and how the phone phreaks hacked it. I told him, “I made an operator-assisted call to what had to be the last holdout of direct dial in 1985.” I wanted to make a reservation at the Stovepipe Wells Hotel in Death Valley. The number in the Yellow Pages – that I had to go to the library to get – was 00 and ask for operator 54. When I did that she put me on hold a couple minutes and came back with the hotel.
Just before the shutdown, the children’s art museum I volunteered at opened an exhibit about storytelling. One of the displays was a Remington Quiet Riter on a pedestal with a sheaf of papers that you could roll in – they had a tough time finding a ribbon for it.
The kids clearly had no idea what to do with a manual typewriter. They’d tentatively poke the keys until I showed them how to pound on them with great vigor.
