The real fun bit is watching 12 year olds try to dial out on one.
I kept my desktop rotary until 2017 when I got a cell phone with the landline number ported to it.
NGL, the desktop rotary was a Godsend in the winter of 1996 when the Northeast got hit by a massive ice storm that took out power for weeks across parts of the region. Phone lines are more robust - also the power lines intercept the falling trees or catch the ice so while power would often be out, the phones would be just fine.
What folks didn’t get about the rotary phones is that part of the spring-loaded mechanism under the dial is a magneto that puts voltage into the line as you dial.
Think of the old 1930’s movies where the phones had cranks on them - you would actually charge the circuit to make the call. When dial tone phones came on the market big time in the early 80’s the phone company increased the monthly fee by $3.50 to dial-tone phone users in order to make up for them having to provide power to the phone.
I had a fun time getting that charge removed from my bill… would be talking to the operator and dialing the phone as I did so they could hear the rotary click stops… Ahem… Fix that bill, thankyouverymuch…
I saw a mediocre movie about Walt Disney once (not authorized by the Disney company or I think even the family). It was fairly low budget and one of their selling points was having the star of Napoleon Dynamite in a minor role. Anyway, at one point in the movie a character answers a call on one of those really old crank phones where the user lifts the earpiece but the microphone stays on the wall. The caller is asking for someone else, so the character puts her hand over the phone to shout for the intended recipient in the busy building, except the actress put her hand over the earpiece in her hand instead of the microphone on the wall. I’m sure she’d never used that type of phone before, but I chalked it up to the inexperience of the production team that no one caught that goof.
Haha yeah its SO FUNNY that kids don’t know how to use something they’ve NEVER USED!!
You’d think that maybe - just maybe - they’d see a movie or show that had older phones on set and see them in use? What era was that show Stranger Things set in?
Lotsa rotary phones in use at that time… but then again, who actually watches a show when everyone’s got their noses glued to their devices. LOL!
Yeah because the shows come with a tutorial /s.
It’s easy to learn too. To input a number, put your finger in the hole and rotate it clockwise until you hit the stopper, then repeat.
Yes its not brain science. I never had a rotary, then bought one, and immediately you can understand how to dial a number.
Back then, you weren’t allowed to own your own phones, you had to rent them from the phone company, and they charged you for each line to go with it. In addition, you had to pay extra for colors, or fancy styles.
We had one in the kitchen, one in my parents’ bedroom, and one in the family room down stairs. So my Dad, who wouldn’t spring for a color TV, already had to pay for THREE phones, and THREE lines, so he wasn’t paying for any upgrades like color. We had three black, Bakelite, rotary dial phones. He wouldn’t even spring for the touch tone phones, when they came along.
And we could forget about having a line in our bedrooms. When I got old enough, I used my own money to buy a super-long cord that could stretch from the kitchen to my bedroom.
What age are you?
69
nice.
Texting on these used to be so hard… Especially listening for the replies
I hated rotary phones. It took forever to dial a number.
But it’s also why heavily populated areas have certain area codes. These numbers were just faster to dial. For instance:
- 212: Manhattan
- 213: Los Angeles
- 214: Dallas
- 312: Chicago
- 313: Detroit
- 314: St. Louis
- 321: East Central Florida
- 323: Also LA
- 332: Also Manhattan
- 413: Pittsburgh
- 415: San Francisco
Generally, if the area code took less time to dial, odds are it’s an urban code. The emergent pattern is when middle digit is 1 or 2. Like 816 for KCMO or 918 for Tulsa or 416 for Toronto.
And if it featured higher digits or a zero, it was probably rural. Area Code 907 was established in 1957 for almost all of Alaska. That’s 26 total pulses. 906 is for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and was put into service in 1961 after splitting off from 616, which services Grand Rapids.
Many of the high digit urban area codes were put into use after touch tone dialing became widespread since any number took just as long as any other to dial.
One thing I thought was funny about the way phones used to work is 5-digit dialing. So I reckon that larger towns in the area code got lower numbers as the third digit in their exchange codes because those dialed fastest, but I don’t know that for sure. What I do know is the town where I grew up has a population of about 400, and that digit is 9. The next town over is the county seat with a population of 20,000, and its original exchange codes end in 1 and 2.
TIL, thank you for that!
Also, if you were in a rural area that had the LATA code (the first three numbers after the area code) on a mechanical switcher, you did not have to use the LATA code. Could just dial the last 4 digits. My dad’s farm was in a town that was still sitting on a mechanical switch until the early 2000’s so in the early 80’s we had a budget party line (we were one long ring, while the neighbors had two shorter rings and there was a third person - whom we did not know, that was a phenomenally LONG call maker - you’d sometimes have to wait an hour or so for the guy to get off the line) and all of our friends were just 4 numbers… Can remember many - 8345, 8652, 8033 (<- my best friend in 10th grade…)
It was a decidedly different, and less expensive, world.
I knew about 5-digit dialing, but never knew people used to dial only 4 digits. That’s pretty neat, and probably made life with a rotary phone much easier than people my age realize.
I’m a younger millennial so it was no big deal to grab the landline and dial 1+10 digits to call my girlfriend long distance in 2009. On a rotary phone, it’d probably have taken til supper just to dial lol
I did find a rotary phone in a box at my great grandmother’s house once and played with it because it was fascinating to me. Then I dialed a random 800 number on it and remarked that it was kinda amazing that so many people bought things over the telephone in the day.
…never knew people used to dial only 4 digits…
Yup… the trick was having your LATA code be on the mechanical switcher. They could address 9,999 numbers. Which in a town that at the time had maybe 1,900 people… it was glorious.
Having to dial 911 in an actual emergency was the most harrowing experience ever. Waiting for the 9 to spin down made you feel like your heart would explode. Even worse if you jumped the gun on the following 1 and had to start over. Or you could dial the operator with a single 0, but that was a risky move in the late 80’s/early 90’s when operator services were being wound down.
And towards the end there, operators went from super helpful to kind of mean
Kind of mean may have been relative to the area. In my major metropolitan area, some of them were veritable assholes.
They were phased out for a reason… When I was young everyone in the village had either 3or 4 digits in their phone number. Was very straightforward to use with these phones.
There’s a a computer museum near me and I braced myself for seeing several computers that I’d used through my childhood. I wasn’t prepared to see an original iPhone though.
I’ve seen people keep the wall mounted ones up even after they were no longer usable (these used “pulse” which was phased out around 2000 for “tone” which had been around for a while prior to that but for a decade or so you could chose to keep pulse.)
I remember finding tone pads that you could use with phones that didn’t have tone dialing yet.
Unrelated, my back hurts.
Fuck you too, OP! Quality shitpost
