Kid sees payphone for first time: WTF?

[anon68952647]

I have one in beige. I think there may be a brick inside.

[LDoBe]

Polycarbonate? Nooooo… The Model 500 was invented before polycarbonate. The 500 was made out of Bakelite. Not as flexible or UV resistant as polycarbonate. But much harder and more heat resistant.

[fuzzyfungus]

@MadLibrarian

On the plus side, hardwired phones like that will still work when cell towers go down

If, and only if, the classic POTS infrastructure has been kept in place more or less all the way from the phone back to HQ, rather than replaced with something that is VOIP 95% of the way and something emulating an FXS to keep the legacy hardware happy.

Unfortunately, you can’t always tell one way or the other. Classic POTS is, indeed, quite reliable(barring physically severed cables), because it provides everything you need, power and connectivity, from the relatively heavily battery-backed telco facility. That’s expensive, though, and most of the time excessive, so there is a strong incentive to do a little trimming wherever you can. Fewer hours of battery backup on POTS lines, replacement of epic copper bundles with IP or IP-like links to hardware much closer to the endpoints, even freaky hybrids (like the ‘HomeConnect’ product that Verizon attempted to push as an alternative to repairing hurricane-damaged copper) that connect to cell service but are used through a DECT handset or phone plugged into the base station FXS port. All of these still look pretty traditional at the edges; but lose some or all of the reliability in the middle.

[fuzzyfungus]

@SpunkyTWS

This is comparable to the time a kid went in to use my mother-in-law’s rotary phone and was completely flummoxed by it.

Kids these days just don’t understand technology. If you need to dial a rotory phone, and have a real computer handy, just open Audacity, select “Generate” → “DTMF Tones” and enter the desired phone number. If all you have is some mobile device, search your wretched ‘app store’ for “DTMF Generator”.

The weird device attached to the front of the phone is some sort of finger-trap for old people; but the phone itself still responds normally if you speak to it in its language…

(yes, technically a rotary phone would never generate DTMF tones; but odds are very, very, good that the line it is attached to will expect them and, if anything, is only still supporting pulse dialing for legacy compatibility)

[anon63496581]

touch-tone

Thank you! For some reason, my brain just couldn’t pull that one out of storage.