So instead, she was the lady who invited the phone guy up into the porn room… with her kids there!
I forgot about this - my mother was a young nun from Pittsburgh (long story) and took a teaching job down in Columbus, GA in the mid 70’s. She drove down and went to call her parents when she arrived and got a “We’re sorry, this number has been inactivated” message - it took her a week to ask somebody and find out that there was no direct dial long distance in Buttfuck, GA at the time! She had been a big city girl her whole life and had never considered that she was really going down South!
Hello, you have a collect call from “hidadcanyoucomepickmeupfromfootballpracticethanks”. Do you accept the charges?
I made the mistake of doing that, with a friend, to a pay phone in a local department store. The security guard was not amused, and neither were our parents who were called to take us home.
And yeah, I remember exchanges, until our FAirmont-1 became 321. And party lines. There were about six neighbors on the same line, and you had to count the number of rings. And there was always someone eavesdropping on your calls.
Maybe I missed it in this thread, but you can buy rotary cell phones.
Back in the 60s and 70s (and perhaps still today) there was a number that the phone techs could dial and it would ring back to the calling station. That was fun if you wanted to be annoying to your family.
To this day still, you can “flip” the wires in a phone jack (typical wire colors for residential service are red and green.) What you will have is a phone that will ring, can be answered and is capable of talking with the incoming caller, but can not be dialed out on.
Helloooo? It’s Edith Anne phhhhtttttttbbbbbb!!!
I remember my dad having to change the 6 volt battery on the phone.
You picked up the phone listened to see if any one was on the line if you heard no one talking you asked “Line busy?” If no was on the line and you were callling someone on the same line you would turn the crank to ring the phones. So you would ring the propper rings for who you wanted to talk to. If it was another line that you were callling it was one long ring for the operator.
Our phone number 23F11: twenty third farmers line 11th phone. our ring was two short rings.
When we got our PT&T phone about 1955 or so, it was a party line serving 16 homes. Dad always insisted we keep any phone calls under 3 minutes incase someone else needed to use the phone.
An’ that’s the TRUTH! 
Like this?
We still had a rotary phone in the house until about 1989 or so (this was in NZ, incidentally)- not for any particular lack of technological advancement, but simply because it was in the house when we moved in and it worked perfectly well, so why spend money on a new (and not particularly cheap, IIRC) touch-tone phone when there was nothing wrong with the rotary phone that was there?
I had a friend in high school who had a rotary phone in their house (this would have been around 1996 or so) for much the same reason, and none of us thought it was particularly unusual.
Besides the computer related “having to get off the dial-up internet/modem game connection so people could use the phone” thing, I recall that making/receiving international calls was still An Event (“Your aunty’s on the phone from London!” being announced in much the same voice you’d use to indicate that the Prime Minister was calling). When my Dad and I were in the UK in the late 1990s, we’d be phoning the rest of the family back in NZ and even though there was direct dialling available, it wasn’t especially cheap and the connections invariably sounded like we were trying to talk to people on the far side of Mars (with similar transmission delays, it seems)- Yet in recent years when I’ve had to phone people in Europe or the US or wherever, the quality is good enough and the transmission delay slight enough that they might as well be on the other side of town instead of thousands of kilometres away.
Cool! I want one.
I can get a big discount if I buy 100 or more. They have two in stock.
i would buy one but Verizon does not use SIM cards, I like my Verizon. 
I tihnk that’s why more “important” areas like DC and NY got lower area codes: DC being 202, NYC being 212…
I remember a joke on MST when the character was dialing a number and Mike asked, “How many hours have rotary phones added to movies over the years?”
You know how you could get a rep as a ballsy anti-corporate rebel in the Ma Bell days? You could buy and hook up a knockoff non-AT&T phone.
You see, the whole network was an AT&T/Western Electric monopoly, and attaching non-standard equipment could corrupt the network! You could do it, but if you got caught–like if a Ma Bell tech came to your house and discovered the ersatz equipment–something bad would happen to you. No one exactly knew what, but the rumors were pretty awful.
Did the breakup of AT&T coincide with the emergence of novelty phones?
I feel the same way about paying extra fees to text on cell phones.
Total rip-off.
I won’t pay extra, thus I don’t text.
No, they came a few years earlier. The AT&T equipment monopoly was broken by the Carterfone ruling, in 1968. (Although the effects took a few years to become apparent, and well into the 1970’s people with off-brand equipment felt like anarchists.) After the equipment monopoly was broken, first competitors and then AT&T themselves got a lot more creative in handset design. This was before divestiture, in 1984.
“0” maybe a low number but it’s the longest wait on a rotary phone.
Did callers customarily let the phone ring longer in those days? It sure seems that way in old movies.