......???


....no more having to wait for that rotary wheel to go back....to dial.......

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I reject your reality and substitute my own!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/18/2019 09:55PM by NewtonMP2100.

I was excited when they went from operator to rotary phone.

Yes, I was a bit of a phone phreak in the early 1970s, but I lived in a city served by General Telephone. While I'd seen Touch-Tone phones in other states—even a pay phone in Illinois—that wasn't something GenTel supported on its step-by-step exchanges. Finally in 1975, they added a tone converter and began offering pushbutton dialing. I'd built myself a frankenphone that had both tone and dial, but the tone pad was only for use once I'd reached something that could accept tone input.

Well, yeah. For about six months after we got our first touch tone phone, it didn't work with tones, but had to use the clicky sounds until the phone company upgraded their own system.

Really the biggest change was being able to buy a phone from a store that wasn't Ma Bell.

That change in the NYC Metro area happened in the mid-1960s. Ma Bell had a place at the 1964 ~ 1965 NYC World's Fair where fairgoers could try the new touchtone system (there was also a "bubble" where fairgoers could make a free "conference call" to a friend or family member anywhere in the country. My whole family crowed into that booth once and called a relative upstate). A few years after that, my sister got a job with Ma Bell and, was able to get her own, discounted phone line, with a Touch Tone Princess phone. Maybe because I saw and tried a Touch Tone phone early on, I quickly got used to using a Touch Tone phone so, no real excitement.

What I would get excited about, would be if modern cellphones had the reliability and voice clarity that was taken for granted back in the 1960's over the old "POTS" system.

Now if you'd asked about early Palm Pilot PDAs, that got me excited. It's a shame when Palm was "circling the drain", that Apple didn't buy Palm if only to get Palm's vastly superior Contacts, Calendar, Notes and, on device search. Apple still lags behind in some of these areas 20+ years later.

When I left Aviano Air Base in 1991, they still had a mechanical switch.

What a monstrosity those things are.

Hoo boy yes. My older sister had her own bedroom, and got her own Princess phone. And being a bit of a phreak I quickly learned the 999 codes, and then got obsessed with the FSW voice response test system. It had like 20 digit codes to use it in demo mode and I memorized them all just to listen to the computer talk to me.

Of course most systems still could understand rotary switching. So the campus phone in the varsity locker room at college was “incoming calls only”. So I would happily call my girlfriend long distance by blipping the cradle buttons...

I was happy that I didn’t have to crank the side of the phone to reach Mable the operator anymore.


I do miss Mable though.

My sons, now in their early 20s, were with me in an antique shop about 10 years ago. Rotary phone for sale. I asked them if they knew how to make a call using it. Of course, they had no clue.

The reason we moved so much, when I was growing up, is that my dad was the guy who upgraded central office equipment first from operator assisted to direct dial, and then from rotary to tone dial. He worked for Stromberg-Carlson, which was a division of General Dynamics. We had so many different phones, who could count.

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Roswell, GA (Atlanta suburb)

I remember them well. It was such a jump into the future with touch tone, and us kids would tie up the line playing with the buttons trying to make songs.

It was really a throwback when we visited our grandparents who lived in a rural area. They still had party lines and you answered the phone after hearing a certain number of rings assigned to that particular number. It was very easy to eavesdrop on your neighbors with that system.

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Randy: What the @#$%& are you talking about?

I miss disconnecting the yellow wire so the extension phones wouldn't ring, and Ma Bell didn't know we had them.

Not exactly blue boxing though.

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You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

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by believing all possible evil of evil men.

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And hope is a lousy defense.

You make me pull, I'll put you down.

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Telcos charged more for lines that could accept tone dialing (may still do so in some places), so at one point in the 70s I had a pushbutton phone that looked like a Model 2500 Touch-Tone set but actually sent pulses instead. It could store up the digits no matter how fast you keyed them in, but then you had to wait while it finished sending the pulses at the maximum rate COs would accept.

The first push button one we had was also the first one we had that wasn't black. It was a hideous avocado green.

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Athens, OH

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Mr Downtown
Telcos charged more for lines that could accept tone dialing (may still do so in some places), so at one point in the 70s I had a pushbutton phone that looked like a Model 2500 Touch-Tone set but actually sent pulses instead. It could store up the digits no matter how fast you keyed them in, but then you had to wait while it finished sending the pulses at the maximum rate COs would accept.

I think all they did when you paid for Touch Tone service was to reverse the Red and Green wires at the central office. I found this when I moved in the 1980s and my touch tone phone wasn't working in my new place even though I was paying for the service. The red/green were also reversed in my house, and that needed to be corrected.

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Mike Johnson
Well, yeah. For about six months after we got our first touch tone phone, it didn't work with tones, but had to use the clicky sounds until the phone company upgraded their own system.

Yep. That was our first one with buttons. In fact, I believe they called it a push-button rotary dial phone. Dialing a "1" was quick, but it still took forever to dial "0" for the operator. It was a real step forward when the phone company actually used touch-tone service.

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wurm

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Mike Johnson
Well, yeah. For about six months after we got our first touch tone phone, it didn't work with tones, but had to use the clicky sounds until the phone company upgraded their own system.

Yep. That was our first one with buttons. In fact, I believe they called it a push-button rotary dial phone. Dialing a "1" was quick, but it still took forever to dial "0" for the operator. It was a real step forward when the phone company actually used touch-tone service.

I think it's still common on landline phones sold today, there's a setting for Tone or Pulse dialing.

Wow. I thought those were made just for the transition period between pulse and tone. Then again, maybe there are still some places where you just pick up the receiver and ask Mabel to connect you.

Back in 1969 when everything was Ma Bell I made my own phone and hooked it into the system. Being a young kid I would eavesdrop on my older brother’s conversations. When he started to get curious hearing the “click” with me connecting I added in a volume control from an old radio so there would be no more click. When i got tired of my phone that i kept under my bed the wires got shorted out. We lost phone service for about three days. When the serviceman came and saw the wires where i tapped in he gave them a tug and all the junk under my bed went sliding around. My father had no idea and the guy said don’t let it happen again and let me go. I also learned that an electric guitar would be able to pick up the conversation when held near an extension phone without picking the phone up off the hook. I think it only picked up one side of the conversation though.

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Formerly known as Dennis R

The original Apple phone?

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In tha 360. MRF User Map

I still have two rotary phones alive in this house. The pink one was purchased from Wisconsin Bell in June, 1983 and the dial shows the four digits that my parents used to make calls in Baraboo at the time.

When the grandkids were young, they loved coming over and making calls on those phones. We don't have answering machines (remember those?) on either so we don't give out that number. The only calls we get are from immediate family, a few telemarketers, and folks trying to reach the church that had this number before us.

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GGD
I think all they did when you paid for Touch Tone service was to reverse the Red and Green wires at the central office.

No, having a reversed tip (green) and ring (red) leads didn't matter for pulse dialing, but would, as you discovered, prevent tone dialing from working. (It's also what caused an extremely short ring when someone hung up an extension phone.)

Enabling tone dialing on a subscriber line was done in different ways for various kinds of switches and wire centers, but I don't think anyone did it by deliberately reversing tip and ring on subscriber loops.