Dark Roasted Blend:
Chuck Palahniuk once said: “People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone”.
It won’t be very long before children will not be able to recognize any of these as telephones. I remember we had the above pictured one as a kid (we lived on a farm for a time and actually even had a Party Line – ask your parents) and we hated it when a phone number had too many zeros or nines in it.
I still have the basic black Western Electric/Bell System rotary desk phone I got in my first apartment in 1982. Not too different from the picture above, actually.
http://joelnicholsblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/captain20morgan20spiced207501.jpg
Apart from a slightly loose RJ-11 connection in the handset and a deliberately disabled ringer, the thing still works. And it wouldn’t have needed an AC cord during our recent blackout, either.
Oh, wah, too many 9’s and 0’s, dialing is so hard! Sounds like a real Ironman competitor.
I remember my brother hard a party line in has country house up to 1992 when his second child was born. When he moved to a 15000 person town his family finally got their own phone line.
Missing the point… The downside of dialing 0’s and 9’s wasn’t about effort, it was about TIME. The amount of time for the dial to make it all the way around and back was non-trivial. Try it, if you can find a dial phone.