Originally published at: Vintage tutorial on how to use a rotary dial phone | Boing Boing
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they told me that they’d never used one and didn’t even know how to operate the dial. We’ve come full circle
Tee hee!
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Rotary dial, operators…
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And that book she was perusing? That was a telephone directory, where everyone’s name, address, and phone number was printed out for anyone to see.
Privacy has always been an issue!
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The Rotary Dial Club or the RDC as they’re known to the cool folks.
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Shes a national treasure! That damn snort and the “is this the party to whom I’m speaking” still crack me up. She used snark as it should be, nice cuts, not too deep but of the papercut variety, smarts out of proportion to size. Wish she’d call me.
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There was something so satisfying about the sound and feeling of the rotary spinning around and around
And does anyone remember the weird transitionary period before touch-tone dialing where some phones had buttons but you could hear that that they were really dialing inside because you heard the “whirr” rather than beeps?
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I remember that! I also remember “dialing” using the hook on a pay phone. There was a phone booth near our Boy Scout meeting place and we used to call home for a ride by tapping the hook the proper number of times for each digit of the phone number. Saved a dime. Pesky kids.
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Bonus for using them without a dial. Could be usful as some pay phones locked the dial, but were otherwise operational.
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For a long time after touch tone calling went into effect, phone companies charged an extra $2 or so per month for it, despite the fact that it was costing them more to keep the old equipment in service. Cheap, stubborn old fossils [looks at ceiling] could stay with pulse dialing (like rotary phones) and phones had a “Pulse/Tone” switch to accommodate them. Of course, once you had dialed the number, if you got into a phone menu you had to switch back to “Tone” to make selections.
(I just checked the manual for my cordless phone. It can still be set for pulse dialing, although tone is the default. Once connected, pressing the star key switches temporarily to tone.)
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Those phones were sturdy, too. Built to last. You could probably brain someone with the handset.
Back in the days of Ma Bell, you merely leased the phone. You couldn’t actually buy the thing.
In any case, dialing takes too long compared to pushing a few buttons.
My Grandpa was still using a wall-mounted Crank Phone [on a party line] until well into the 70s.
Hell, they didn’t get electricity out there until the late 30s…
The ‘Good Old Days’ my ass!
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When I was a kid, we had a 10-party line briefly after moving to a new subdivision where the phone infrastructure wasn’t completed. When the phone rang, we had to listen for our own ring (two longs in our case) before answering.
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For quite some time, it was useful to have a dual-option phone: you could toggle a switch between tone and pulse, and sometimes it was cheaper or free to use pulse rather than the ‘new’ tone option.
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You said it in far fewer words. I’ll allow it. Just a small Coke for me, please.
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