How old are you?
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Tiktok: "look at this cool thing I found in the back of this restaurant, it's like an old cell phone, but it's mounted to the wall, it only makes calls
and you share it with other people!"Reddit: "help, wtf is this thing?"
Mastodon: "oh cool. That's the unique one that was made by Western Electric to supports both pulse dialing and tone dialing depending on the jumper behind the keypad. The logo is for a phone company that went bankrupt after 3 months and is now part of Verizon. I have three of them in my living room."
Facebook: "oh the good old days! I still can't believe Obama banned payphones!"
Okay, since this went viral and I don't have a soundcloud, I'll just drop a link to the @connections Museum (telecom history) in Seattle/Denver that I have yet to successfully make it to!
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Tiktok: "look at this cool thing I found in the back of this restaurant, it's like an old cell phone, but it's mounted to the wall, it only makes calls
and you share it with other people!"Reddit: "help, wtf is this thing?"
Mastodon: "oh cool. That's the unique one that was made by Western Electric to supports both pulse dialing and tone dialing depending on the jumper behind the keypad. The logo is for a phone company that went bankrupt after 3 months and is now part of Verizon. I have three of them in my living room."
Facebook: "oh the good old days! I still can't believe Obama banned payphones!"
@IrrationalMethod @galacticstone
I have a 5lb rotary phone and a 1980's faux ship phone
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Tiktok: "look at this cool thing I found in the back of this restaurant, it's like an old cell phone, but it's mounted to the wall, it only makes calls
and you share it with other people!"Reddit: "help, wtf is this thing?"
Mastodon: "oh cool. That's the unique one that was made by Western Electric to supports both pulse dialing and tone dialing depending on the jumper behind the keypad. The logo is for a phone company that went bankrupt after 3 months and is now part of Verizon. I have three of them in my living room."
Facebook: "oh the good old days! I still can't believe Obama banned payphones!"
@IrrationalMethod @galacticstone Children: Why did you use to glue your phones to the wall when you were small?
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While I understand what you're going for here, I suspect asking this question on the fediverse is going to skew the results somewhat.
Like, I am sure there are folks here who would drive two hours out of their way to use a rotary pay phone.
@IrrationalMethod @galacticstone *cycle
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you're right, I can't believe I wrote "drive"
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How old are you?
@galacticstone I grew up in a city and had both dial home phones and dial pay phones. At the same time, when visiting my grandparents, we used crank handled phones and calling long distance entailed calling the operator and waiting for them to forward the call through many hops to the person you wished to speak with. In many ways a simpler and less "noisy" existence.
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How old are you?
@galacticstone I've used a rotary phone (grandma's house) but never a rotary payphone; all those I've used have been touch-tone. :^)
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Tiktok: "look at this cool thing I found in the back of this restaurant, it's like an old cell phone, but it's mounted to the wall, it only makes calls
and you share it with other people!"Reddit: "help, wtf is this thing?"
Mastodon: "oh cool. That's the unique one that was made by Western Electric to supports both pulse dialing and tone dialing depending on the jumper behind the keypad. The logo is for a phone company that went bankrupt after 3 months and is now part of Verizon. I have three of them in my living room."
Facebook: "oh the good old days! I still can't believe Obama banned payphones!"
@IrrationalMethod @galacticstone me: oh cool, a payphone that's not derelict or a defibrillator or a library!
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@galacticstone I have made a call on a rotary payphone without paying.
The coin mechanism in that payphone depended on the dial. If you held a dtmf dialer up to the horn and dialed the payphone never started charging money.
(Last century)
@PE4KH @galacticstone Phreaking?
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@IrrationalMethod @galacticstone Worked great until they almost got arrested...
@fullyabstract @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone
For some reason this reminded me of our family sitting down to dinner and letting the phone ring as we scowled, "the nerve of people calling during dinner time!"
Needless to say my phone is on DND 24/7 except for my parents, my wife, and my sister. -
How old are you?
@galacticstone
Payphone? We have phone at home, just wait and use that, saves a dime.
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How old are you?
@galacticstone When I first moved to America I refused to pay the phone company extra for tone dialling, so my push button phone was set to pulse dial.
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How old are you?
@galacticstone I am both much older and way younger than one might think.
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@PE4KH @galacticstone Phreaking?
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@shapr @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone I have one from the early 50s that has a party line ringer. I assume the ringer still works, but nothing sends party line ring signals anymore. Everything else works fine; it can call numbers through my FTTH box.
@mweiss @shapr @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone
I thought party line ringing was generated at the Central office.
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@mweiss @shapr @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone
I thought party line ringing was generated at the Central office.
@w_b @shapr @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone it is. The ringer was designed to respond only to a particular pattern so it wouldn't ring at all if the call was intended for someone else on the line.
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How old are you?
@galacticstone I've used a phone-company-issued calling card from a Touch-Tone
payphone, but I think the rotary ones were all phased out by the time I ever made a sent-paid coin call that didn't involve the operator.I'm old enough that I was taught how to use a phone in school, including operator-assisted calls. We still had five-digit local dialing when I was in second grade. (Then we moved to a rural area remoted on a digital exchange so seven-digit dialing was mandatory.)
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@mweiss @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone wow, even though I've had two VoIP jobs I didn't know a party line ringer was even a thing!
@shapr @IrrationalMethod @galacticstone I discovered it when I brought the phone home and it didn't ring. I had to do some research online to learn about this one.
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How old are you?
@galacticstone
One of my first tasks as a technical editor was to assist the senior editor in taking apart and putting together the pay part of a payphone, to test the documentation.
It didn't go according to the instructions but we fixed them.I remember button A and button B!
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How old are you?
@galacticstone Can't call yourself old school unless you've tipped a street urchin a farthing to run a message from Kensington to Whitechapel, preferably in mid-winter.
