Our house was built during the 40s and has a phone nook in the entrance hall. My grandmother thought that was so cool she dug up an elderly rotary phone from her basement so we’d have the proper thing in the nook. The phone is probably in the ballpark of 50 years old - my dad had to rewire it before it would work. We use it occasionally.
It was a couple of years ago and I remember it because I was trying to dial fast and my finger slipped out of the hole just before it got to the end and I had to start all over. Then it happened again. So on the third time of initiating an infernally slow system it succeeded.
While I miss a lot of things about older, simplier times, these phones aren’t included in the list.
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… and that was just for a local call.
(What was cool though was my grandparents old wallphone with a crank. You’d tell the operator something like Fairview 538 and she’d say “One minute please”, hear a few clicks and you’re connected.)
I have a 1960’s rotary phone in my home. So I use one daily. I sought it out specifically because the sound of one being dialed reminds me of my childhood.
Those old "candlestick’ phones from the 1920’s-will they srill work?
It’s been about 5 years. My pops had a rotary dial phone in his kitchen. We moved him into an old folks home, so I haven’t used one since. Man, it was pretty slow to dial a number. I’m wondering, if I switch over to a cable phone system, will a rotary dial phone still work?
OLdfield 9 - 4574
We had a huge rotary dial telephone at my Mother’s house for years and years and years. It finally gave up the ghost and we wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons. Nope, says Ma Bell, the phone belongs to us.
“Number please…”
I think I have the exact phone in my room. It’s actually my sister’s. It’s incredibly loud and it’s in my room so if the cordless dies we can still hear it ring. I think I actually dialed out with it sometime last year.
July 2007. There’s a rotary phone in the basement of the house we bought last year. I picked it up and dialed my wife’s cell phone to see if it worked. It did. I left it there in case we ever need a phone in a blackout (I don’t like using cellphones - they’re too small).
July 2nd, 1986. The day before I got married. The store that I worked in had one and it was old at the time.
Not at all. If you’d like, you can send it to me for proper ahhh, treatment. 
Actually, if you take a little care in setting them up, they’ll work just fine. The main “hard” part is being sure that you’ve got it wired up correctly to the appropriate subset. This is the box that would have been mounted to the underside of a desk, or on the wall, and held the ringer and the electronic components that interfaced the talking and listening parts to the phone line.
As for the last time I used a rotary dial phone? It would be harder for me to recall the last time I used a touchtone phone at home. At the moment, I’ve got only one touchtone phone plugged in and five or six dial phones plugged or wired in.
on a similar note: There are millions of people who have never rolled down the window in a car.
Somehow that bothers me.
Methinks I am older than you…
kinda sucks, doesn’t it ? 
(and I don’t even have a lawn for you to get off of…)
Depends on how high-tech your phone switch was.
My second gig with the phone company was a supervisor over the techs running an old step-by-step office, a “stepper” switch. Rows and rows of cans of mechanical switches, relays, and miles of wire. Each bank of cans used a digit of your phone number, connecting to the next bank of cans with each phone number.
The pulses from the rotary switch actually powered the solenoid that lifted the switch mechanism to the next row of contacts. If your first digit was “6”, then six voltage pulses lifted the mechanism six positions (a ratchet kept it rising) and then it swung over to find a free contact on that switch. The next digit went to the next bank and so on, through the 5 banks of switches. (If you dialed 7 digits, the first bank just dumped the first two - we didn’t need them)
If you were so new-fangled to have a touch tone phone, we had “pulse packs” on the back of each switch that converted your tone to nice, old-fashioned, pulses.
It gave you, the customer, the illusion of having a high tech phone system. The transition period was probably just the time it took your central office to install the pulse converters.
My children had to be shown how to roll down a window when I bought my old 1990 4Runner. Kind-of amusing and sad at the same time.
The also asked me once about those big-black CD’s they saw on TV.
Probably 1988. We moved house, and got a different phone company that had touch-tone service. I think we had to pay extra for it.
I remember my great aunt having a little doohickey that was made of Bakelite which was used to dial the phone instead of your finger, so you wouldn’t muss your manicure.
Yeah - that was a rip-off, the fee for touch tone service. We, the phone company, couldn’t tell, at least in our style of central office. All banks of incoming equipment had to have tone converters, regardless of who connected.
Well, today the littlest Mercotan tried her hand at dialing a phone, for the first time in her 19 years of life.
She got a wrong number.
About 11 or 12 years ago. My bf and I had the exact same phone pictured in the OP.
Huh. It’s been years, now that you mention it.
When I started at my current job, the hardware store in town was still reached by calling the operator and asking to be connected - they didn’t have a direct dial number.
I found an old phone in Grandmother’s basement about 40 years ago, the upright kind with a round disk and a horn sticking out of it for a mouthpiece, and a tapered cylinder hanging on a U-shaped hook on the side for an earpiece. No dial at all. She let me fool with it, so I started trying to make calls by quickly drumming on the hook to imitate the cam-and-switch action of a dial telephone. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes I got operators instead, and they were surprisingly nice about it.
Last week. We have one of these in my daughter’s bedroom:
bakelitephone
I had to show #1 son how to dial it a few years ago. I always liked the sound the rotary made and the “ticking” on the line as you dialed…
I’ve got a heavy old pink rotary phone in my studio in the basement. I’m guessing I’ve dialed it sometime within the last 6 months. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much studio time lately…