I know a couple of old people who have their phones set for Pulse dialing instead of touch tone.
In both cases the phone must be a decade old, and it’s the kind with huge buttons.
When it was taking forever to dial home dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit, . . . I thought of just flipping the switch to Tone dialing. But being a visitor I chickened out.
Would I have been doing them a favor, or is there some reason for the old setting?
This is a big city, so there is no question about ancient switches at the phone company equipment.
They may have elected not to pay the extra dollar or two that some telcos still charge for the “convenience” of touch tone service, so switching the handset over to tone dialing may have rendered their phone incompatible with the dialing network.
Is pulse still cheaper? At one point I discovered that your phone still works switching it from pulse to touch tone. Touchtone is actually cheaper for TPC, since it occupies the switch for less time.
The OP should switch it to touch tone, just once, to check. Not that I’d advocate ripping off my former employer, of course. 
Saving that buck a month would be my guess as well. Until the telco that serves my mother joined the 20th century and installed a 5ESS switch, they did charge extra for tone service.
My aunt had a few old rotary phones and never paid that extra dollar for touch tone. Her one electronic phone was always set to pulse. At some point, I noticed they no longer charged that dollar for touch tone, so when I went to her house and flipped the switch, it worked. Apparantly, there’s no more switching equipiment in New Orleans for rotary dial phones, so anyone can use touch tone and they don’t get charged extra (or everyone gets charged extra). The old rotaries still work and you can still use a phone on pulse, but there’s no point anymore.
My Dad still uses pulse dialing-he’s a depression child. Pulse is also the fallback dialing mode if DTMF fails to communicate-that’s how I program burglary and fire alarm panels.
My mothers farm still has 4 rotary phones in use. These were installed in 1954, and are still working fine. A 5th one just broke last year.
Her company still had a phone out in the warehouse where the rotary dial was a separate box added a few years later, and wired into the phone. It was still in use up to a few years ago.
There are probably millions of such phones still in use across the country. (They were really built to last back then.) There is no reason to replace them as long as they work. So people will continue to use rotary dial pulse dialing for many years to come, because that is what these phones use.
Slightly related story:
My dad is one of those old codgers who actually still rents a phone from the telco rather than using his own handset. Anyway, about five years ago, he still had a rotary phone (that’s how long he’d been renting it). He discovered telephone banking and wanted to finally upgrade to a pushbutton phone. So he rang the Telco…
“Good morning. Telstra…”
“Yes hello. I’d like to upgrade my rotary phone to a pushbutton one.”
“I’m sorry sir. We can’t replace your handset unless it is faulty.”
“Uh… huh. Sooo… what if I were to drop it onto a concrete floor?”
“Then we’d replace it for you, sir.”
“Thank you very much. Bye.”
Continued hijack below…
HA. I had almost the same conversation once with my mobile phone service. A month or so after I bought it the battery started having problems holding a charge. I called and they said their warrenty doesn’t cover batteries. I asked about damage to the phone and they said my insurance would cover a full replacement - battery and all.
I said “so if in a few moments I were to run over the phone with my car,… by mistake,… you’d replace the phone and battery?”
“That’s correct sir”
“Bye”
Vroooooom! Crunch!
Ring.
“Hello Mobile Phone Company. I just ran over my phone with my car.”
“Oh, sorry to hear that. We’ll send your replacement straight away”
Back in the mists of time when I was living on a much tighter budget, the keypad stopped working on our cheap phone handset. Until we could afford to shell out for a new one, we would dial numbers by briskly tapping the ‘hook’ button - (i.e. if you wanted to dial 3, you’d go tap-tap-tap) - it was a right pain in the arse, but it worked - pulse dialling was for quite some time very much easier to implement than tone dialling on things like burglar alarms.
I can think of two cases in which you would need to use pulse dialling: first, if your telephone buttons are broken, and second, if you have an injury or accident in your home which leaves you immobile, and within reach of the telephone’s receiver but not its buttons. In those cases, you can press the hook repeatedly to simulate pulse dialling.
This is the first I’ve ever heard of hook-based pulse dialing. Am I alone? Thanks SDMB. Igerrince, etc…
Nope, you weren’t alone. Veddy interesting.
I should probably elaborate on this a bit then. Pulse dialling can be done with little reed relay ; DTMF requires tone generators.
It was a useful skill to have when people “secured” telephones by removing or locking the dialing mechanism.
Another advantage of pulse dialing is that it works even if the phone is miswired. Some old touch-tone phones will not dial if the wires are reversed.
So that’s why in those old movies when people get cut off they tap tap tap the cradle and call “Operator! We’ve been cut off!”?
No, that’s just to get the operator’s attention. Only works if there is a switchboard op monitoring a hundred lines on a board; she sees one flashing, and knows there is a problem that need personal attention. Otherwise, that’s useless.
Well, if the movie was set in the US or Canada, and they tapped the cradle exactly ten times in one second, then yes, that would get you to an operator.