Imagine this scenario. All the telephones in the US operated without dials, all depended on a human operator connecting your call by hand. No phones had dials.
City by city, AT&T had to roll out new equipment, giving rotary dial telephones to everyone. They put out this message via a newsreel shown in the town’s movie theaters:
At midnight Saturday the telephones in this city will be changed to dial service and all telephone numbers will be changed.
What an incredible problem to have to solve. Completely replacing an almost universally used installed hardware base overnight. No early adopters. Everyone gets a new phone and your old phone will stop working at midnight.
Here’s the video. Fascinating.
And if you have a landline, I’m pretty sure that same phone would still work today.
Nope. DTMS wasn’t invented back then.
I’m glad I still have my rotary. C. 1982, but probably a decades-older design.
I’m saying rotary phones work on today’s landlines. Not that DTMF phones would work in 1936.
Wow!
It’s amazing how competent AT&T was back in the day (and innovative!). Now they exist almost in name only and mainly just try to minimize CapEx 🙂
Can you imagine the outcry if something like this was attempted today?