Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: TechMan on March 05, 2014, 11:16:59 AM
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM) :rofl: :rofl:
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Progress. First rotary phones were owed by Ma Bell. You were not allowed to buy and install a different model.
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I'm pretty sure dial tones are still with us, but I guess busy signals are a lot less common.
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Progress. First rotary phones were owed by Ma Bell. You were not allowed to buy and install a different model.
Yep, when my grandfather passed my mother found that he was still renting his phone from an RBOC and this was in 1990s.
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"Hello, Mabel?"
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fp2.la-img.com%2F368%2F21451%2F7362783_1_l.jpg&hash=023c3f636a5a584a016ae74027d8017ed489db3f)
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I'm pretty sure dial tones are still with us, but I guess busy signals are a lot less common.
Voice mail was not an improvement. If I wanted to talk to you I would call you. Except most of the time I would probably send a telegram telling you I was going to call you so you would know 1) that nobody died (unless someone had died) and 2) when I was going to call you.
Long Distance Calls (yes, a proper noun) were fun - dial O and ask for the Long Distance Operator, who would ask you what city you wanted to call.* They would connect you with the Long Distance Operator for that city if you were really, really lucky. Most of the time they confirmed your number and told you they would call you when a trunk line was available. Once you got the Long Distance Operator in the city you wanted to call, they would connect you with their entral Exchange who would then tell you the number you wanted was busy. Then you reversed the whole procedure and finally got a call telling you that both a trunk line was available and the number you wanted to call was available. (The destination Central Exchange would call the number you wanted and inform them there was a Long Distance Call for them and to stand by until a trunk line became available.) This could literally require two (or more) days.
Telegrams were much easier - 12 cents a word, plus the person at the other end needed to give the boy delivering it a dime. You could call Western Union if you had an account. If not, a telegraphy station was not that far away if you were in the city, or down at the train station in just every small town. $Diety help you if you lived out of town. Not more than an hour from when you slid your message slip over the counter the boy was delivering the telegram.
The War Department used Western Union to warn Pearl Harbor and Manila that Japan was more likely than not going to attack. Manila got the word direct as the Army had a WU account; Pearl got the message about two hours after it was received at the central WU station due to heavy commercial traffic which was being sent at priority rates while the War Department used standard rates. If you ask me, it's a lesson about why you do not really want the .gov to try and save money.
stay safe.
* - podunk places did not have Long Distance Operators so your call was routed through some big town/city with an available trunk line to the central exchange in Podunkville. When they had a trunk line to Podunkville available.
"Hold the wire" was not an instruction to the customer but to the Operators along the line. A process often emulated by MARS operators. (Does anybody else remember MARS calls? Over.)
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We've a couple MARS stations here but I don't know the last time they were used. Supposed to be some sort of emergency system now as I understand it.
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My mom was a Bell system operator back when they still had to pull the cables up and plug them in. During her tenure they introduced the computer cards to record/bill LD calls where they used a pencil to mark the boxes instead of hand writing everything.
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Most of the central offices I work in still have a rotary phone hanging around somewhere that is still connected to the switch. One remote location still had a rotary phone as the only phone as recent as 2010. Fun to call the test center on a rotary dial and then here "press 1 for the next available technician".
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi23.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fb398%2FFLHRI-OK%2Flily_tomlin_01.jpg&hash=a3efc40ce639106e9fdab5ea7f68b3adeb1479c1) (http://s23.photobucket.com/user/FLHRI-OK/media/lily_tomlin_01.jpg.html)
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My parents have had an old looking rotary phone on the wall since I was a kid that is like the picture above. It has an ear piece and fixed mic with the rotary dial. It still works.
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Used MARS a couple times when we were in Germany. Mom never could get the hang of saying "over", so it boiled down to them calling once a week on Sunday's as that was the cheapest time for them to call. A call from the states was about 1/4 the cost of a call to the states from Germany. Deutsche Bundespost charged an arm and leg to phone calls. Phones had click counters on them. Local calls were one click per minute, "long distance" calls the number of clicks varied by distance. Each click was 10 pfennig and it was either 10 or 20 clicks per minute to call the US. So you'd sit there talking to home, watching the click counter roll like a slot machine. "HiDad,Everyonehereisfine.How'severyonethere?Good?Greattalktoyoulaterbye."
Had to send one wife back to the states because on the first exercise her husband was gone for she ran up a 8,000.00Dm phone bill in one month calling home to mother because she was lonely. :facepalm: :facepalm: :facepalm:
Moved him into the barracks he spent the rest of his tour eating in the mess hall and giving all his money, minus $25 for Health and Welfare items, to Deutsche Bundespost each month. Not the way to do a four year tour in Deutschland.
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OK, that was cute.
Kinda sad, in a way, but cute.
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Pretty phunny that picking up the handset didn't occur to them as the first step.
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My mom was a Bell system operator back when they still had to pull the cables up and plug them in. During her tenure they introduced the computer cards to record/bill LD calls where they used a pencil to mark the boxes instead of hand writing everything.
my mom has often told us the story of how she saw an airplane strike the empire state building while she was working as an operator.
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I feel soooo ancient.
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Used to be you could dial out on touch-tone phones by pulsing the hook. You know, (303) XXX-XXXX = taptaptap taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap taptaptap, etc.
Haven't tried it lately with the new 10-digit sequencing, though. Pain in the doopie-do.
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The best part was finally working up the nerve to call a girl only to have the rest of the family listen in from the other room.
=|
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The best part was finally working up the nerve to call a girl only to have the rest of the family listen in from the other room.
=|
Haha! And the "yes", "no", "maybe" and furious wisper "my mom just walked in!" conversation was born!
My beef with the old style handsets was they made my ear hurt. And do you know how much teenage girls can talk? AOL IM made all nighter gab fests with girlfriends so much less painful.
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When we got married the first phone we got was a candle stick style with a rotary dial. This was right after at&t started selling their designer phones. Long calls were painful.
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When we got married the first phone we got was a candle stick style with a rotary dial. This was right after at&t started selling their designer phones. Long calls were painful.
A few years ago my dad gave me a candle stick phone. He had bought two of them for $5 each when he was growing up. He sent both of them to some guy in Canada to rehab them. The guy did rehab them and took the original internals out and put internals in that will work with today's switches (original internals were returned with the phones.) I have made calls on it several times.
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At the World's Fair in the early 60's AT&T showed off the then-new touch tone dialing system at a booth. They had two vertical columns of lights which showed the times it took to dial for each system.
So you dialed a number on a rotary and the lights would progress up the column and stop when you were done. Then you'd try the touch tone dialing and it was supposed to show the timing on the other column and you were supposed to oooh and aaah about how much faster the touch tone system was.
I got screwed up because by then I had become quite proficient on touch-adding on an adding machine (part of my job at the time), where the numbers went 789-456-123-0 from the top down, whereas the new-fangled phone buttons went 123-456-789-*0# from the top down.
I kept getting a "DIALING ERROR" light when the machine caught the fact that the numbers I dialed on the rotary were not the same as on the touch pad, or when I hit the * or # keys instead of 1 or 3.
Wife1 had no trouble with it, though, and consistently dialed faster on the touch pad than I could.
That damned reversal still plagues me on dialing to this day.
Terry, Living Historian.
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The same probablem occurs if you use calculators a lot, or the number pad on the keyboard.
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^ Yeah, don't I know it, because I was also using a Friden mechanical calculator a lot at the time. Tap-tap-tap-tap, enter, buzz-whirr, ketchunk, kerchunk, kerchunkiity-chunk, write down result with a pencil.
(https://armedpolitesociety.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oldcalculatormuseum.com%2Fm-fristwop.jpg&hash=12429533dd100c6da2e59e8a1d558487888a5dbc)
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At the World's Fair in the early 60's AT&T showed off the then-new touch tone dialing system at a booth. They had two vertical columns of lights which showed the times it took to dial for each system.
So you dialed a number on a rotary and the lights would progress up the column and stop when you were done. Then you'd try the touch tone dialing and it was supposed to show the timing on the other column and you were supposed to oooh and aaah about how much faster the touch tone system was.
I got screwed up because by then I had become quite proficient on touch-adding on an adding machine (part of my job at the time), where the numbers went 789-456-123-0 from the top down, whereas the new-fangled phone buttons went 123-456-789-*0# from the top down.
I kept getting a "DIALING ERROR" light when the machine caught the fact that the numbers I dialed on the rotary were not the same as on the touch pad, or when I hit the * or # keys instead of 1 or 3.
Wife1 had no trouble with it, though, and consistently dialed faster on the touch pad than I could.
That damned reversal still plagues me on dialing to this day.
Terry, Living Historian.
IIRC AT&T intentionally switched the keypad on the phone to be the opposite from a calculator. They were afraid that accounting type people would overwhelm the CO switches by typing the number to fast if the keypad was arranged like a calculator.
ETA: Evidently that is a wife's tale. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119296 (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119296)
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The best part was finally working up the nerve to call a girl only to have the rest of the family listen in from the other room.
=|
Is that better or worse than the other people on the party line listening in? :laugh:
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The lettering thing 'splains a lot:
There was another reason as well. When it came time to match letters of the alphabet up with the numbers, putting 1-2-3 across the top made a lot more sense because it was the most natural way to get ABC in the top row. If 7-8-9 had been at the top, one of two things would have happened — the letters and the numbers would have run in opposite directions, or PRS would have been the first set of letters. Either arrangement would have seemed very odd, indeed. (From the cited article)
'Course, that comes from the day when telephone exchanges were all identified by geographic names: LExington 3-XXXX, FLushing 3-XXXX, MUrray Hill 7-, etc.
The "zero" was never used as part of the exchange number.
In Boulder CO at the time almost all numbers were HIllcrest 2, 3, or 4, and it was typical to write your number down as only the 2-XXXX or 3-XXXX (or 4-) and people would understand the first two "digits" were HI-. Our first number was HIllcrest 4-, which works out to 444- in today's terms --or actually, (303) 444-.
(At the time, Boulder CO only had a population of about 50,000, for those of you who do the math.)
Yeah, we had a party line for a while, but it was such a PITA, especially counting the rings when it rang, we finally decided to spring the extra moolah for a private line. And of course, other folks on the party line would pick up the phone and claim they miscounted the rings, sorry.
One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies, three ringy-dingies, was us.
And if you were mailing something to someone in Boulder, you could just address it as:
Mr. and Mrs. Joe Blow
182576 Pine St.*
City
No actual City, no State, no Zip, no nuthin'.
And it would get to them.
Terry
* I didn't want to use anything that might actually be a house number on Pine St. Most house numbers were only 4 digits long.
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My dad still has his monster Friden calculator, and it's in running condition.
My new house is also wired for a phone. The phone's a bit older than the house, but otherwise works as designed.
(https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/t31/192403_3990527960982_464274954_o.jpg)
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Next time I'm down there I'll have to sneak into Dad's den and see what that giant piece of cast iron adding machine on his desk is. He's also got a very,very old NCR cash register from the tavern. I think the most it could ring up at any one time was $5.99 if you hit three highest keys.
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'Course, that comes from the day when telephone exchanges were all identified by geographic names: LExington 3-XXXX, FLushing 3-XXXX, MUrray Hill 7-, etc.
The exchange name convention is still in use. Just not for dialing telephone numbers.
Each central office is IDd by it's exchange name. It comes into use particularly with location identification codes for the various central offices in a circuit path.
Some of the ones in use in the Tulsa metro area include- Temple shown as TULSOKTE or National shown as TULSOKNA.
There is also General Adams, Amhurst, Riverside and a few others.
The phone company never throws anything away.
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Gewehr98 : So is the phone that high up on the wall, or haven't you hung the picture yet? <grin>
Seriously, a beautiful setting for the phone.
scout26: Makes me wonder what that $5.99 in today's "money" might be.
RoadKingLarry: Well, they gotta ID them somehow, why not with variants of location names? Beats mere abstract numbers.
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Well, they gotta ID them somehow, why not with variants of location names? Beats mere abstract numbers
Of course, I was just pointing out that the legacy of the exchange names still lives on.
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I *think* that alcove was built into the wall for a statue of Mary, or something similar.
Since I'm Lutheran, and already had the ancient Stromberg-Carlson phone, voila'!
I keep the laptop computer from my grandparents' estate here in my office. They did all their accounting for the two auto parts stores they owned on it.
It's wireless. No batteries needed, either. The Burroughs works very smoothly for its age.
(https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1/1779919_10201723478108080_1742613153_n.jpg)
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Nice thing about those old adding machines was that you didn't have to enter all the zeros for a number like $50.00 =)