Originally published at: Tens of thousands of old phones linger in vintage seller's inventory | Boing Boing
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They can be broken down into
Circuitry (2)
Copper (1)
Fiberglass (2)
So they are not completely useless.
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That site is an antique! I would not order through their online system.
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Do dial phones even work anymore if you plug them into a landline??
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And they make wonderful gifts. You never know what they’ll be made into.
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And it also seems to be getting slammed at the moment, probably from BoingBoing-related traffic - I can’t pull it up on my browser. Wonder where it’s being hosted?
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Nope.
Support for that tech died about 30 odd years ago.
Dial phones do still work on landlines. The Phone Company (and even the tangled web that it turned into) is very good at backwards compatibility. The trick is finding a working landline. My 80+ year old neighbor has one. Users of DSL in my area have them too, but the DSL data rates are so low compared to cable that few exist.
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I’m gonna guess a 90s-era Compaq in their basement.
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I used to buy parts from Phoneco to keep the old Western Electric cord switchboard and dial phones working at Hotel Congress in Tucson. They eventually lost interest in keeping it up after the claimed requirement for emergency calling fell by the wayside with the complete takeover of cellphones. The system is still there.
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That’s completely 100% wrong. I used dial phones until I finally got a smartphone in 2011.
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2013 for me, when I converted my landline # to google voice over IP with obitalk. I still keep it up with 911 location info for $2.50/month with callcentric. (for the children)
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That is cool! I’m going to order one. There are VOIP adapters that let you output regular phone voltage so these can be wired in to a modern VOIP system.
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I know a couple places that still have working rotary phones so I’m not sure where you got that idea. They can’t be used for most automated phone directories (“press 1 to continue in English” etc) but they still work fine for making voice calls.
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H-word? Need a little help here.
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My fiber Internet has a box with two phone line ports as well as the LAN. I pulled the Bell line wires from the demarcation panel in the basement, and ran a phone cord from the box to a wall jack to connect all the house phones. Aaand, it seems like it still accepts pulse dialing.
I should pull out a modem and see if fax works.
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We still have one working at my house, and use it routinely. I’d wager that my kids are some of the only ones in town who know how to make calls on one.
What’s funny is that over the last couple of decades I’ve had to upgrade mobile phones a couple of times when the carriers eventually stopped supporting the old standards. But not the rotary phone, which was already a bit of an archaic novelty when I got it around 30 years ago.
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I have a working landline… for now, at least.
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At least they’ve figured out some niche marketing:
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