The Telephone -- Old School

[Mona_Lisa_Simpson]

Oh, mom’s father worked for the local phone company. (Not Bell, fully owned locally). They always had the wire spool tables out at their place for picnics and mom has stories about her and her sisters using wire from the phone company to put curls in their hair.

My parents still have a hard-wired landline phone with a rotary dial in the basement. One that Grandpa set up when we moved back to town (away from the garish disco-house) with a freebie phone, and an “illegal” extension. The edge of the drywall in that corner is all ragged, I used to pick at it while I talked on the phone to my friends in high school.

[BMalion]

@Rico

Has anyone seen this?

http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/cell-phone/8928/

It’s an old style handset with Bluetooth to connect to your cell phone.

I want one. Anyone feel flush enough to buy one for me?

I have one as well, but I got the cool one with the spiral cord to plug into my phone. Retro all the way baby!

[tdn]

@CWN

Is this the type of phoneyou are thinking of?

That’s the one. It’s called a sultan phone?

I don’t remember ever seeing one that was made of wood though.

[Peremensoe]

But notice the “dial” is just a ring of pushbuttons. I don’t know of anybody making new rotaries, though there are plenty of working old ones out there.

[Any_Other_Name]

@Onomatopoeia

When I was a kid in the mid '60s, all our phones were rotary dial. I remember my mother locking the dialer with a device that prevented outgoing calls, and taking the key with her when she went to work. We could receive calls, we just couldn’t make them.

If it was like the lock our parents got, the lock fit into one of the holes in the rotary dial, preventing it from rotating. Within a day we learned that you could click the receiver to simulate the clicks the rotary dial when it rotated back. With practice, we could dial anywhere.

We learned how to do it by word of mouth from friends, back then there was no internet to help us find the hack.

Probably cost mom and dad more than before, because we’d get wrong numbers fairly often.

Good times …

[davidm]

@Mona_Lisa_Simpson

Sorry, didn’t mean to forget this thread.

My parents bought a house in this small town Northern Ontario in 1977. My dad had just started working for the provincial government and was in Toronto for about 2 months, while mom was left in this small, mostly french speaking town, with an 8 year old daughter and a not quite 3 year old son.

This house … was something to behold. It had 3 different patterns of geometric design wallpaper in the kitchen, all in red, orange and gold. My bedroom had yellow and silver wallpaper in some kind of Op-art garish radiating circles. The living room was popcorn ceilings, popcorn walls with glitter embedded in it, and white shag carpetting. The bathroom had some kind of blue fun-fur rug, (I told my brother they had skinned Cookie Monster) It was all quite garish.

But my parents bedroom had… (and this wallpaper went down within the first month, but not before the telephone guy came) some kind of dot-matrix type grayscale shades of women with bare breasts doing…things… I really can’t remember much but I think there were three images, one of a woman on top, one being done doggy style, and one where she was possibly performing oral sex on a man? I really am not sure, but I know my mother was HORRIBLY embarrassed by it and did not want to be seen as a “lonely newcomer leading phone guy into her bedroom with the porno wallpaper”.

So I got to stay home from school that day.

Wow. The previous residents must have been some kind of hippies or 70s swingers. I never heard of anything like that before.

Or maybe it was previously a bordello?

[Mama_Zappa]

@DMark

I can remember the hell to be paid if my father was calling home and we kids were chatting forever on the one phone line.
When the neighbors had to come over, ring the doorbell, and say, “Your father is trying to call home…” you knew your ass was grass.

Heh… I had the same thing happen (from the other end)… trying to call home to let them know that Brother#3 had fallen and hurt himself. I finally called the neighbors. Brother#1 got chewed out over that one.

Hasn’t been an issue with either of my kids even if we didn’t have call waiting.

[Musicat]

When I was young, no household had TWO phones; too expensive. We had a gadget that clipped on the phone earpiece and had an “extension” earpiece a few feet away connected by a rubber hose of about 3/8 inch diameter. The 2nd party held that to his ear (it was acoustically coupled; no electronics) and could hear the conversation just fine. Of course, he had no mouthpiece, but he was close enough to the main unit for that to pick up a word or two.

And my first phone didn’t have a coiled cord, but a straight one that kinked a lot and didn’t go very far. The handset weighed a ton and was hard-wired to the wall.

In this rural part of the country, all local phone numbers only required dialing the last 5 digits, and everyone knew the first of the five was a “3,” so when you told someone your phone number, you only gave the last 4.

Then when answering machines came in in the 1970’s, I bought one for $600 that was the size of a typewriter. The phone company gave me shit about connecting it to the phone lines and wanted me to install (and pay for) some kind of isolation device. I refused, and they dropped the request, since a challenge was making it thru the courts about that time.

I really hated dropping my human answering service, but $600 was cheaper than they were over a year or so.

The only nice thing about the answering machine (which could not be operated remotely) was the outgoing message tape, a loop. There was a metal foil strip applied to the back of the 1/4 tape to make it stop, and I was able to splice about 8 different messages into the cart, each with a foil strip at the end. So each caller got a different message. I had friends record some and put different music with some. Unfortunately, when someone called and heard the clever message (quite new at the time), they told all their friends to call and listen, too, but none of them got the same message! It tied up my line quite a bit.

I broke into the machine and modified the circuit so I could control how many rings it would answer on, from 0 to 6. It just involved changing a fixed resistor to a variable one and mounting it on the front panel.

[Voyager]

Speaking of phones, this is one prediction 2001 A Space Odyssey got right. Not the picturephone, but when Heywood Floyd is talking to his daughter (actually Kubrick’s daughter) he asks her what she wants for her birthday. She answers “a telephone” and he says that they have plenty of telephones. That was kind of an odd answer in 1968, but it makes plenty of sense today. We have plenty of telephones, some hooked up and some put away in closets.

[Folacin]

We had a town operator until I was in high school - dial phones came in sometime around 1974. My friends and I figured out the “dialing by clicking” thing because we were bored.

Prior to the dial phones, my dad’s office number was 224, and our home was on a party line with that - 224C2.

We were out west visiting relatives and dad need to call back to town for something. Direct dial obviously wasn’t a choice - and he had a hard time explaining to the operator that, yes, 224 was the entire number, and she’d need to connect to the local (non-Bell) company and they’d be able to complete the call.

[Hypno-Toad]

We had two dial phones in the house I first remember. One wall-mount in the kitchen with the super long cord and one desk phone in my parents bedroom. As a little kid, I considered the desk phone more as a piece of furniture than a device. It was certainly heavy enough.

[Magiver]

Back in the day when the switching systems were mechanical you could call yourself, hang up, and the phone would ring.

[tdn]

@spark240

But notice the “dial” is just a ring of pushbuttons. I don’t know of anybody making new rotaries, though there are plenty of working old ones out there.

Someone with a rotary dial would have a pretty hard time surviving in today’s world. I can’t pay a bill without touch tone.

[RTFirefly]

@Scarlett67

I remember calling time and temperature over and over when I was bored as a kid.

The time recording in the DC area was TI4-2525* when I was growing up in the 1960s. It still is, but they’re going to terminate the service at the end of May. I’m still in the habit of using it to reset our clocks after a power outage. I guess I can use the time on my cell phone instead, but it’s just that I’m so used to being able to call that number and get the time, down to a 10-second increment.

• Actually, 844-xxxx for any values of xxxx. Back in the rotary phone days, that meant you could dial it significantly quicker by dialing 844-1111. Remember how long it used to take a rotary phone to go back to its starting position after you dialed a 9 or 0? Like watching grass grow.

[LSLGuy]

@Mean_Mr.Mustard

…How about in old movies or TV shows, when someone is speaking on the phone and they become disconnected, and then they repeatedly and rapidly tap the ‘hang-up cradle’ in an effort to get the connection back. Has that ever worked?..

In the days when calls were connected by human operators, not machines, cycling the on-hook switch would blink the light which got the operator’s attention.

She’d then come on the line & you’d tell her to re-establish the call. Or if she noticed, what with all her plugging and unplugging of other calls, that your call’s plug had come partway out of the relevant socket she’d stuff it back in and the call would be reestablished. Or maybe it was just a spot of corrosion in her switchboard & jiggling your plug would reestablish good contact.

Jiggling the hook-switch stayed a movie trope long after even primitive automated switchgear made the move obsolete. But its origins are 100% legit.

[kushiel]

@jtgain

Dad telling you to stay off of the phone for now because he was expecting an important call.

The new old version of that: Dad telling you to get off the internet because he was expecting a call. It was totally awesome when our ISP started offering an app that would detect an incoming call and display caller ID. My uncle called damn near every night, so I got into the habit of opening about 10 tabs at a time to have stuff to tide me over until he got off the phone. This was back in the day when the Dope server was seriously slow - 2002-2003ish.

[Markxxx]

@RTFirefly

The time recording in the DC area was TI4-2525* when I was growing up in the 1960s. It still is, but they’re going to terminate the service at the end of May. I’m still in the habit of using it to reset our clocks after a power outage. I guess I can use the time on my cell phone instead, but it’s just that I’m so used to being able to call that number and get the time, down to a 10-second increment…

You can always use Time.Gov (from the US Government)

[Zsofia]

@BMalion

As long as he wasn’t too far from the wall!

For some reason the one in the kitchen was WAY longer than the others. I guess for proper burglar-beating.

Remember your grandma telling you to get off the phone because there was a storm?

ETA - remember cool phones? I got one of those see-through phones because I sold so many goddamned chocolate bars for band… and you’d get a free football phone if you subscribed to Sports Illustrated!

ETAA - I am old enough that when I took the Red Cross babysitter course I was strongly indoctrinated to write down the numbers for police and fire in my babysitter notebook where I also recorded the number of the restaurant the parents would be at. I actually had to call a restaurant once!

[UltraVires]

@Any_Other_Name

If it was like the lock our parents got, the lock fit into one of the holes in the rotary dial, preventing it from rotating. Within a day we learned that you could click the receiver to simulate the clicks the rotary dial when it rotated back. With practice, we could dial anywhere.

We learned how to do it by word of mouth from friends, back then there was no internet to help us find the hack.

Probably cost mom and dad more than before, because we’d get wrong numbers fairly often.

Good times …

If for some strange reason you wanted to, I believe that you can still dial that way, sending a pulse down the line.

[UltraVires]

@tdn

Someone with a rotary dial would have a pretty hard time surviving in today’s world. I can’t pay a bill without touch tone.

I remember until around 2000, touch tone dialing cost about an extra 50 cents per month, something that my grandmother found to be wastefully extravagant and refused to pay for.