Eldergays What Was A Rotary Phone Like?

It took only one stroke of the pen to dial Zero for the operator.

I really miss slamming the phone down at the end of a telephonic argument. Pushing a button on a touchscreen just doesn't compare.

I wish I could hang up on the Kindegays who start these stupid threads.

I showed a teenager a photo of a rotary phone from the 70's and he asked me how did you know who was calling. I told him that you picked up the phone and said hello, and that's how you knew. He looked at him like I had just grown another head.

r4 And did you?

My parents paid the extra $1/month for TouchTone, but back when it first came out, the fee was actually justified because the phone company actually installed a device outside your house to enable it that listened for the tones & pulse-dialed the line in response. In the late 70s, they removed the box because the central office equipment had DTMF-recognition built in (but you could still hear pulsing after dialing calls to other exchanges. I think "pure DTMF" dialing finally arrived around 1986. It was weird hearing the ring start before you even lifted your finger from the final digit.

Then... modems happened, I got a second line, and... it required pulse-dialing, because I didn't feel like paying the same $1/month charge for it since autodialing pulses was no big deal. Until Bellsouth raised EVERYBODY's rates by $10/month, then made it "free" (late 90s, when a second line went from ~$18-20/month to ~$32/month after fees & taxes.

[quote]I heard people died because it took so long to dial the emergency number

Yes, we had coronarotary virus in those days. It claimed the life of Barbara Pepper, a character actress who appeared on "I Love Lucy" and "Green Acres," as well as Canadian figure skater Barbara-Ann Scott and 1980s comedian and game show panelist Marty Cohen.

I love the videos of kids and teenagers being shown a rotary phone and they can't figure out how to dial it.

"papa, papa! tell us about the telegraph!"

All that laborious manual dialing kept us fit. The obesity epidemic took off as soon as push-button phones became the norm.

When Bea Benaderet couldn't the accept part of Ethel Mertz because she was under contract to the Burns and Allen Show, Lucy's close friend Pepper was Lucy's second choice. But Pepper was such a notorious drunk they couldn't insure her. Enter Vivian Vance. Pepper nonetheless did bit parts on the show over the years.

We had 911, bitch.

...we also had 411.

My fake nails has allowed me to escape the Pleb virus, bitchezzzzzz

This thread has brought back a long repressed memory: they must have been tricky things to keep clean as there was often a layer of scratched sticky grime on the number surface under the clear dial. Remember noting this on the phones of friends and relatives too.

There is a layer of scratched sticky grime under most of us, r15.

I loved rotary phones. And cigarettes and stick shifts. I miss the DOING.

I'm here for you, r17.

No one died because the emergency number was too long. Anyone in that bad a shape would have died if the EMTs were located next door. Back in the day we had full time telephone operators and all anyone had to do was dial 0 and tell the operator you needed help and they would get help to you.

r19

We're they like this?

The arrival of buttons was so exciting...around the same time as Concorde. The world seemed to be turning into The Jetsons.

Operator! I need assistance!

You haven't REALLY made a call until you've made it on a rotary phone. In MY day, nothing else would do!

[quote]I loved rotary phones. And cigarettes and stick shifts. [bold]I miss the DOING[/bold].

And, by this point, most likely the DONG.

I can't believe the USA had touch tone as early as 1963. Those Americans was advanced in those days. We didn't get it as standard until the 90s in England.

R23

Oh honey, in your day you had to climb up a pole to get to the only telephone in miles. You had to crank it for fifteen minutes, dial, and shove the receiver up your ass for better reception.

People don't seem to get so excited about new inventions these days. I guess there are too many... or something.

Cell phones lack all glamour. "Push M for Murder"? I think not.

Love dialing with a pencil!

You can buy rotary telephones on Amazon and in specialist shops. These are 'retro' rather than old second-hand originals so they work with modern phone lines and have modern features. I'm a millennial so I'm very tempted to get one so I, too, can dial fabulously with a pencil.

I tried googling an image of Auntie Mame dialing with her cigarette holder but all I could fine were pics of her working the dual switchboards.

I think the guy in r21's video was the second sheriff on "Murder, She Wrote"

Yes, r25, my mother was born in 1951 and she had it from the time she was a young teenager. We have a few pictures where you can see the phone on the wall in the kitchen and on a side table in the living room. I always thought the phones looked so strange without the * and # buttons.

When my parents got married, my father was too cheap to pay for touch tone service. It was an extra charge plus the phones were more expensive to rent from the phone company (we had to do that too.). My father finally gave in and paid for it for a few years in the 1990s, until they made it free.

What about party lines? We were part of one in the 70's and it was no party!

My mom always had a phone list near our phone on the bulletin board. We had the numbers for fire, police and ambulance on that list, always.

But yes, it took a good 20-30 seconds to dial.

[quote] my father was too cheap to pay for touch tone service

we're related!!!!

R21, granted that that is a commercial from the phone company, but...

We all complain today about people being on their phones and not "in the present." Yet, here in 1963 (the year of my birth), here's a woman in the middle of a party making a phone call!

Most people had two phones in their house...in the kitchen and in your parents' bedroom. I can remember by the time I reached high school, my parents agreed to have a third phone in the basement. What a thrill that was! I also remember my uncle had two lines in his house, so my cousins could talk on the phone without tying up the line...Wicked Cool!

Eldergays, what was life like before Billie Eilish?

r36, having a second phone line for the kids was a great marketing ploy for the phone company too. "The Brady Bunch" episode where Mike installed a payphone in the family room probably started this, although he had a private line in his home office.

I can remember they used to do a separate listing in the phone book too...you'd see them every few pages:

Brady, Michael 4222 Clinton Way, 762-0799 Brady, Michael Children's Telephone 555-6161

We had two lines growing up, but the second line was unlisted and it was not exclusively for the kids.

[R36] I used to waste hours talking on the phone. Now I don’t talk for more than a few minutes, I text mostly. One time I talked to one of my friends for a marathon time of ten hours. I remember we started around seven PM and I finally went to bed at six AM. Talking used to be a great American pastime. I used to get rashes on my cheek!

In those days, you had to remember a lot of phone numbers. But it was a little easier, because there was usually just one phone number per family.

For the first 9 years of my life, my family had just a single rotary phone. It was avocado-green colored, too! (mid to late 70s, of course.) Now, if I lost my phone, I wouldn't even know my parents' or brothers' phone numbers. Oddly enough, my much-younger millennial brother, who's only known wireless touchtone phones, knows my and my parents' phone numbers by heart.

Echo Valley 2-6809.

I gotta call that number one more time

'Cause I've just got to know if you're still mine

I talked on the phone so much to my best friend that my parents had to get a SECOND phone with a different number just for me! Of course it was a rotary phone....The curly cords on a rotary phone....they made you feel like Ann-Margret!!!

I remember talking with friends on my sister's Slimline phone.

I LOL'ed when Hyancith exclaimed she had the same phone. (Although by the time we saw Hyancith the phones were touch tone dial, not rotary.)

My first 'push button' phone (not touch tone) was one I bought in the 70s and paid a hefty premium for.. Touch tone service hadn't reached my area yet, but this phone had buttons just like a touch tone phone but when you pushed a button you could hear the sound of rotary dialing in the ear piece. It took just as long to get a call to connect, but you just didn't have to physically dial a wheel. It was about 4 months after I bought that phone that we got touch tone service.

Back in those days you usually had to rent your "instrument" from the phone company for a monthly charge. I had a former employee who had gone to work for Ma Bell and risen rapidly up the ranks. We met up for lunch one day at his office. As we were walking out we took a shortcut through the warehouse area where they stored the phones installers would use when going out on calls. I noticed in one area hundreds of telephones of all sorts and sizes that had just been thrown into a huge 4' pile against a wall. These were phones the installers had picked up from customers who had either wanted a different phone, canceled their service, had mechanical issues, or had been retrieved for non-payment. My friend told me all those phones would be destroyed, even if they were perfectly good instruments. They could afford to be that wasteful back in those days.

OP, the rotary phone had nothing to do with the Rotary Club. Don't get confused.

I can remember not having to dial the area code for numbers within the same area code. I grew up in NYC, and when the city split into (212) and (718), that caused a lot of consternation.

I also remember being upstate in the Adirondacks and just having to dial the last four digits for an in-town call. And who doesn't remember:

TEx-xxxx or MHx-xxxx Bonus points, if you know that!

What was the number for calling time? “At the tone the time will be 7:22 and 30 seconds *beep*.

I want to say the number was * * * - 1212

[quote] TEx-xxxx or MHx-xxxx Bonus points, if you know that!

Our number was BE7-8950 or 237-8950. The BE was the Belmont exchange.

Our phone numbers were Murray-hill 5-9975, the second was CIrcle-7-2099, and the third was Murray-hill 5-9099.

When we moved to Brooklyn it was Bensonhurst 0-7741

[quote]"Push M for Murder"? I think not.

Exactly. It would be "Press M for Murder."

And the question mark goes inside the quotes.

My number is Beechwood 4-5789.

You can call me up and have a date, any old time.

Cash only.

Sherwood 6-0856

I have a metal ID bracelet from the 60s that had my full name, my dad’s name, that I was a Protestant and then SH6-0856. I don’t know if those bracelets were common or not.

We still say "Dial a number" even if we don't turn a dial for goodness sake. Like we used to say "off the hook' long after the hooks had gone.

Fun fact: he dialled "M" in the movie because they lived in flat in Maida Vale and in London your phone number in Maida Vale would have been MAI 3322 etc...I know this also because my childhood phone number was [bold[MAI[/bold]da Vale 1107...as you can see we dialled 3 letters in London.

[quote]I have a metal ID bracelet from the 60s that had my full name, my dad’s name, that I was a Protestant and then SH6-0856. I don’t know if those bracelets were common or not.

They were very fashionable in the late 60s and early 70s (see pic). My father bet on a horse for me and I won fourteen shillings and I went to our village jeweller and picked out an ID bracelet and had my name put on it. I was a trendy little kid. It was a rather nasty little thing (14/- was not a lot of money) and for years it would reappear at the back of drawers etc.

8

6

7

5

3-oh-niyeahine

Rotary phones were a real problem for screen and stage because it wasn't fast enough to dial a 9 or something.

So every phone number only included a 1 or maybe a 2 save time. Annoying!

I still remember my childhood phone number.

me too

My aunt had a Slimline phone with a dial in the inside handle near the earpieces. I found that to be most fancy,

They actually had songbooks of songs you could play with the pushbuttons of the phones.

OP, imagine using rotary to dial out of your area. That was 11 digits, or more for long distance. And if you got no answer or a busy signal, you dialed again. There was no redial button.

[quote]They actually had songbooks of songs you could play with the pushbuttons of the phones.—Elder

I had one.

R53: though I recognize that bracelet you posted, it’s more like this—I think it was s school ID bracelet

They were quite heavy, almost five pounds. I broke several bones when I was a kid after dropping one on my foot.

If a line was busy and you needed to get through you could have the operator cut into the conversation and tell them that an urgent call was waiting.

One thing I remember from the late 70s, my New York teenage friends were always using street phones, dial zero then dial the number and the operator would pick up and they'd say "Please charge this to my number" and give their home number. Surely you could charge to anyone's number. This still baffles me.

Then as answer machines came in they were always checking their machines from street phones.

There were also "services" that took messages for you. I still remember some of the numbers JU 6- 6300 and JU 2- 4240.

By the 70s people stopped saying the whole word if there were letters in a number... PL 9-4100 as opposed to PLaza 9-4100.

Baltimore had the street thing as well. My grandmother was WI for Wilkens Avenue. She also had a heavy but somewhat stylish phone from the 1940s. It was kept in her bedroom. Also long distance was done only in emergencies.

We had this telephone at the top of the stairs on a table for years, you couldn't buy your own telephones in the UK so they were added to the line rental charge.

"Push M for Murder"? I think not. Exactly. It would be "Press M for Murder." And the question mark goes inside the quotes

No it doesn’t. The ? is not part of the title of the movie. If it were, then you’d be correct.

[quote]R38 “The Brady Bunch" episode where Mike installed a payphone in the family room probably started this, although he had a private line in his home office.

Male Privilege at its most naked.

606-0842

And I'm waiting for you.

Why not? It’s his office. He gets and makes work calls. He’s working to support the family. His wife would do the same if she needed and had a home office.

This knee jerk bandying of fashionable terms r70 is what gives political correctness a bad name.

Mmmmm. Why is only his name in the phone book, and the kids just listed as his, then?

Let’s hear you explain away that one.

[quote] Brady, Michael 4222 Clinton Way, 762-0799 Brady, Michael Children's Telephone 555-6161

I broke my finger on the rotary dial once. After that, I never made another phone call until push dials came out.

[quote]And the question mark goes inside the quotes.

Both wrong. Moot point.

Film titles are italicized.

R73 okaaay.... they are kids. He’s paying their phone bills. There are too many to list. Where do you stop?

My favorite show.

Lindsey calls Sean on a Princess Streamline.

Not really r76. The question mark inside or outside the quotes is about correct punctuation. Italicization of titles is a question of style.

^^^^

I used to love going into the Bell Phone Stores...looking at the latest phones. Does that make me a nerd?

once I went away from NYC for a few years and when I returned in circa '96 they'd shut them all down...worse was to come.

Yeah r65, you could clock people in the head with a rotary phone and do some damage.

r78's link has brief glimpses of the lost Virginia Graham show.

[quote]I used to love going into the Bell Phone Stores...looking at the latest phones. Does that make me a nerd?

It makes you archaic, not to mention redundant.

Whether the question mark goes in or out of the quotes depends on your style guide.

[quote]R77 okaaay.... they are kids. He’s paying their phone bills. There are too many to list. Where do you stop?

I am sorry you suffer from such massive retardation.

The point is, Carol isn’t listed, as an individual or as a parent. Just “Michael Brady” and “Michael Brady’s Children.”

GET IT, now?

Because Carol doesn't DO ANYTHING. The house was Mike's before she moved in. So the main phone would be in his name. The new phone in the den is his line, so of course it's in his name and thus the family phone was changed to add children to Mike Brady's already existing name.

There was a period of several years where there were operators but they didn't actually do anything. No idea if they would have called emergency services for you, but I'm not sure they would have. For a while in the late 80s up to the mid 1990s, Southwestern Bell lines were prone to being down or not working properly (which must have been an industry-wide problem because it happened to me in two different states) and in the 1980s I could ask the operator for help checking the line. By about 1993 they would just bitch at you if you called them and not do anything.

It was about that time they sent me a bill for $300 that was "accidentally missing" the itemized list of calls they claimed I'd made, they wouldn't send proof that I'd made $300 worth of long-distance calls -- I hadn't -- so they disconnected me. I was fighting that $300 on my credit report until about 2012, because they kept changing the due date and resubmitting it to credit reporting agencies. Evil. People complain about cell phone companies but they are a million times better than the AT&T monopoly was.

Oh it WAS the most fancy R59, because as you may remember, not only was the slimline design the most chic of the rotary phones, that dial LIT UP.

Do I sound like a Chinese takeaway?

I loved the operators. I loved that if you called someone and got a busy signal, you could call an operator, give her the number, and demand that she listen in to see if anyone was on the line. If it appeared that the receiver was merely disengaged from the phone, it ended there.

But if she reported that a conversation was going on, you could identify yourself as the other party's parent or rabbi or doctor and demand that she break in and announce an emergency and ask that the line be freed.

Now what do you get? Voice mail and a digital Fuck You.

[quote]Oh it WAS the most fancy [R59], because as you may remember, not only was the slimline design the most chic of the rotary phones, that dial LIT UP.

So did The Princess, princess.

Touch tone with automatic redial was a lifesaver for when you had to keep trying someone who's phone was busy, or you were trying to win a radio contest!

In the 1980s, I had one of these. The phone was tinny. The radio was useless. But it did a pretty good job with the toilet paper.

It had two tin cans connected by string.

Barbed wire fence was good enough for me

My Daddy worked for Western Electric for ocer 50 years, which was AT&T's subsidiary that made their phones. But after his early years, he was transferred to the division that made the Nike Zeus missiles, which he was quite proud of.

But he also kept putting aside money to buy AT&T stock at a discounted price and would have left us with what would have have been hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock if he had listened to Momma and diversified his assets. But he wouldn't listen and kept the bulk of his assets in AT&T. He died after AT&T did and we lost a lot.

AT&T didn't "die", and whomever told you an investment in AT&T made pre-breakup was harmed by the breakup was either misinformed or lying to you. AT&T was the literal textbook example of a company that was too big for its own good or economic well-being, mostly because pre-breakup, it basically ran itself like a bloated eastern-bloc state-run enterprise. After AT&T was broken up, the shares of stock in the new companies that someone who originally owned stock in AT&T would have owned was worth WAY more than the original AT&T stock was.

Now... someone who did something stupid, like dump all their AT&T stock days after the court ordered AT&T's breakup and divestiture probably would have lost their shirt... but someone who held on to their stock, as well as the shares of new stock they would have ended up with as a result of the breakup, would have seen its aggregate value basically double within 5 years. AT&T *long distance* took a hell of a beating, to be sure... but someone who originally owned shares of "AT&T" would have ultimately ended up owning shares of NyNEX, BellSouth, Southwestern Bell, PacBell, and the other RBOCs IN ADDITION to shares of AT&T (the new long distance company).

Some of the baby bells ultimately languished, but others (BellSouth and NyNEX in particular) EXPLODED in value over the next few years. BellSouth, in particular, went nuts on technology... Google "Viewtron" and "IBM Simon" for two of my dad's favorite toys from my teens and young adulthood. Yeah, Viewtron was totally lame by 1986.... but in 1983, it was fucking science fiction (if you could afford its outrageously-expensive service fees... or at least, your dad could...)

And Simon... oh god, I loved hauling that brick around for months after my dad gave it to me when he got tired of it & bought a StarTac, even though I couldn't really afford to actually USE its wireless modem, it weighed several pounds, the battery didn't even last a few hours on STANDBY, and there wasn't much you COULD do with it that didn't involve paying dollars and dollars for minutes of airtime. Still... I was in college, and damn, it was fun to whip that thing out and leave it sitting on the desk during lectures for others nearby to drool over, even if I spent most of my time using it just playing with the text-entry tutorial to look like I was doing something interesting with it. It was my first PDA. When some twat says something stupid, like "Apple invented smartphones", I make a point of telling them all about the Simon I had literally 16 years earlier. :-)

I looked at my mom's phone bill and saw that she was renting her phone from the phone company for something like $5 per month. (This happened a long time ago.) She had been renting that phone for the past 20 years or so. That's $1,200 for a rotary phone. She immediately got rid of that phone and bought her own phones.

The cable guy recently came to my house and told me the problem was my modem / Wi-Fi router (which I purchased myself to avoid monthly fees). Now, I'm back to paying a monthly fee to rent this stupid modem / Wi-Fi router.

Well, that would have been my sister, r99, who swindled my brother and myself out of the bulk of our inheritance when our parents died within a few months of each other. My brother put a 38 caliber pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger after I guess deciding not to to join in our lawsuit against her.

We never got a decent accounting of the estates. i just pulled back and didn't get involved any longer because I thought my life would be simpler without a 500 mile distant law case. I still miss my brother and hate my ultra narcissistic sister. Sometimes your life will turn out better if you just remove and get on.

i know mine did.

[quote]he cable guy recently came to my house and told me the problem was my modem / Wi-Fi router (which I purchased myself to avoid monthly fees). Now, I'm back to paying a monthly fee to rent this stupid modem / Wi-Fi router.

ATT Uverse does that with their router/wifi

R101 -- are you... in the right thread?

R99 -- your post was fascinating!

I had no idea touchtone phones were in existence in the 1960s. I'm a "xennial" child of the 80s and 90s. Spent my 80s childhood in the UK until 1989 and my 90s childhood in the US. I didn't see a touchtone phone until we got to the US.

Eldergays, when did answering machines become a thing? And, prior to that, did you have an answering service?

[quote] [R101] -- are you... in the right thread?

Yes, I was responding to R99, who was responding to my post at r98.

Did YOU bother to read the thread?

[quote]TEx-xxxx or MHx-xxxx Bonus points, if you know that!

You lose points for thinking that a prefix could begin with MH. The first two letters were always the beginning of a pronounceable word.

I recall back in the 1980's and 1990's in Rhode Island - in some communities you couldn't get touch tone service. Mostly in North Kingstown. That was because of the type of switch that served that area it was a Stepper. It took crossbar to really accelerate adoption and then finally electronic switching systems. Now the cool part of the Steppers is you made a long distance call you could flash the hook and it would garble the Automatic Number Identification circuit. So an operator would come on the line with no idea of your phone number and you could just give out a number belonging to anyone.

r106

That isn't even close to being right

r103, my family got its first answering machine around 1981. It had an internal 10-second tape for the outgoing message, and an internal 5-minute tape for 10 30-second incoming messages. My parents used it until ~1987.

I always had answering machines (I'm 46). My first had a 10-second digital outgoing message, and used microcassettes for incoming messages. It also had a built-in cordless phone.

My second answering machine was purchased in 1992, and was my favorite & most expensive. It was $299 (!!!), all-digital (~20 minutes of recording time), and its coolest feature... 4 mailboxes. You could define 10 incoming numbers (from caller ID) & associate them with any of the 4 mailboxes. Ditto, for distinct ring patterns (so if you had 2 numbers, one could go to box #2). Callers could also press 1..4 to direct their message to a specific maillbox.

Oh,it also had a TI speech synth chip inside, like the Speak 'n Spell. :-)

Yeah, we actually DID have cool, surprisingly advanced stuff back in the 80s & 90s. I had ISDN & 128kbps internet access in 1995 (well, 112kbps... due to the way ISDN was charged, making a 64kbps or 128kbps digital call cost 3 or 6 cents/minute, but 'analog' calls were free. With a little hacking, you could send 56kbps per 'analog' channel the way ISPs did, bond the pair, and make 112kbps calls for free because the central office couldn't tell the difference).

Life is a lot less terrifying with cellphones. Now we don’t have to worry about a Black Christmas type situation.

I used to love to play with my grandma’s rotary phone. I would use a pencil and have imaginary dramatic conversations

r110

Yeah it's so sad your grammy took her own life.

The phone rang and you answered it WITHOUT KNOWING WHO WAS ON THE OTHER END. It was like taking you life into you hands every time someone called. I don't know how we survived.

r112 Well since you only had one friend, it's not like you didn't know.

But other family members had oodles of friends, R113, so it could have been any one of those fuckers.

I'll be forever grateful for Caller ID display.

Or it could have been R112's parole officer. One just didn't know, back in the day.

And sometimes the call was coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE.

This video was posted on DL before but I wonder if OP isn't the dudebro with the backwards cap?

Old Reader's Digest anecdote:

Guy stops by a service station in New England to ask for directions. Notices phone is ringing and owner isn't answering it.

Guy:. Aren't you going to answer your phone?

Owner: Nope.

Guy: Why?

Owner: Had the phone put in for my convenience..

r117, my grandmother told me me there was once a way to make your own phone ring and that's how her family that lived in a 5 floor brownstone would communicate....one extension on each floor. She couldn't remember how to do it, but it was dialing 3 or 4 digits.

Grandma was right. I don't recall the code, but I remember that capability.

WE6-1234 was the number to call for weather report, which I never understood, because the 3rd letter in "Weather" is an "A" and 6 covers "M," "N," and "O."

NO ONE WHO NEVER USED A ROTARY PHONE CAN REALLY KNOW THE SWEETNESS OF LIFE.

Pencils have no meaning anymore.

[quote]WE6-1234 was the number to call for weather report,

no, it was WE 6 1212

We only had one phone with a short curly cord that would only stretch 5 feet. So no privacy while talking. Then we got the cord that stretched 20 feet and you could get to another room and close the door. Every once in awhile you had to detangle the cord because it got bunch up.

What is a pencil? Is that an old timey thing?

No, R125, it was WE6-1234

"Steady growth of Boston’s only local weather service has included being the voice of Verizon on the phone. We used to update the WE6-1234 Weather for the Phone Company."

I was nothing, but now I’m alive...

Dial-a-Movie in my home town got you a recorded message from the Catholic League of Decency listing every movie playing in town, along with the Catholic League's idisyncratic ratings. "Suitable for the entire family." "Morally Objectionable in Part." "Morally Objectionable in its Entirety."

As a child, I always called the Catholics to help me know which were the dirtiest movies in town.

Similar related....I saw a young guy get into a 1963 Chrysler, and start it, and then sit stumped as to how to put it in gear. Chrysler products, along with Packard, some AMC, some Edsel, and others didn't have the shift quadrant on the steering column on cars with automatic transmission. Instead, they used push buttons. On Chrysler products they were usually on the left side of the dashboard. It was actually a much safer idea, but the GSA wanted all cars to have somewhat uniform controls. Chrysler reverted to the quadrant selector in 1965.

The original 1950s film version of Oklahoma! got a a "C" for "Condemned" rating from the the Catholic Church's rating board because of the number Poor Jud Is Dead, where hero Curly subtly encourages villain Jud to kill himself. No one paid any attention to the rating, the film was a big hit, and it was the beginning of the Church's rating board's influence.

Part of the problem, R131, is that Chrysler's Torqueflight pushbutton transmission controls were opposite (on the left) but identical to the heat and a/c controls on the right of the steering column.

It was easy to confuse turning on the a/c with shifting into "Drive." I know - I had a 1964 Chrysler and my sister had the same problem the first time I lent it to her.

^ Er, that should have been was "the beginning of the END OF THE Church's rating board's influence."

'

R132 I'd suggest it started a decade or so before that, in 1939. My mother told me that when the Legion of Decency gave "Gone With the Wind" a B rating: "Morally Objectionable In Part For All" because Rhett Butler said to Scarlett, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," even Catholics started ignoring them.

They had no objections to the film's depiction of slavery, only to Clark Gable saying "damn."

Selznick paid a one thousand dollar fine to the Legion of Decency ratings board to approve the release of the film with the word "damn." In case that couldn't be worked out, the scene was shoot twice. In Gable's unreleased second take, he said "Frankly, my dear, I don't care."

"Frankly" was an invention of Selznick. In the original novel, Rhett says "My dear, I don't give a damn."

It's little! It's lovely! It lights!

Someone got the future wrong.

R138 They left out the Ericofon

I'm so old I remember when we had a heavy black phone with a party line, it was on a shelf in the hall, and the cord was only about 6 feet long, not long enough to stretch anywhere comfortable.

I was maybe three or so (1950s) and my mother would stand there talking to a friend and I would hang on her leg and whine and cry for attention. I didn't like that her attention was focused on the phone and not on me. She just ignored me and went on talking. She was in her mid twenties then and very pretty.

Later we got an extension phone (a second phone, we called them extensions) also with long extension cords that went maybe 16 feet. My little sister got a blue princess phone when she was about 10, I was so jealous and never got my own phone until I moved out. the bill was about $9 a month.

My bratty much younger sister got everything I and my older sister did not, including a TV in her room, because by the time she came along my parents had more money.

R136 here. I've been googling and finding contradictory things about Selznick and Damn and Gone With the Wind. He did pay a fine to someone to get the film released with the word damn but I don't know which agency it was or how much the fine was. There was some kind of exemption for works based on historical authenticity or literary precedent but he still paid a fine. And Frankly is an invention for the film, Rhett doesn't use that in the novel.

R141 Read "Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration" by Thomas Doherty (Columbia University Press, 2009) for a detailed description of Selznick's efforts to get around "The Code"

Thanks, r142.

Indeed, the short telephone cord did make phone calls very public. After dialing the phone with a pencil, I always thought these telephone tables with a built in seat were the most glamorous things ever. Imagine sitting on one of these when you make your pencil do its magic.

Even Cousin Oliver chided the Bradys for not having a push button phone

we always had 911, way way back in the 1960s

My very first phone was a rotary dial 500 set in baby blue. That was when we were renting an apartment I was maybe 7 years old.

The next year we moved to a house and I got a 2702 or Princess set in the same blue. And TouchTone. so I can use either. But I do miss being able to slam the handset down on the phone.

[quote]But I do miss being able to slam the handset down on the phone.

It's just not the same to crisply take off a clip-back earring when answering a cellphone.

R144, my grandma had a 1950s phone bench with a metal rack for the phone book underneath the shelf.

I wish my foyer was big enough for a phone bench. It's a square room with 5 doorways so there's not enough wall space.

I'd like an American Breakfast Nook.

Like this, R151?

Or this?

Learning how to use a dial-phone.

"What's that ya doin?" - 1963 and we began our long goodbye to the rotary phone.

867-5309. My number's on the wall.

[quote]my grandmother told me me there was once a way to make your own phone ring and that's how her family that lived in a 5 floor brownstone would communicate....one extension on each floor. She couldn't remember how to do it, but it was dialing 3 or 4 digits.

They are called ring back numbers and it varied from company to company. It was usually like 796-xxxx and the last four digits were your number. You'd hear a weird stuttering dial tone then you'd hang up and it'd ring

Oh yeah and back in the day of wireline phones. I had Nynex - signed up for service but never got a bill. This went on for months with me calling them and everything. Apparently what happened was the work order to hookup the line went in but never got put in the system. Even my Long Distance they fat fingered the configuration and all my long distance billed to the local VA hospital. That was interesting.

I could punch in my phone number on a touch-tone phone simply by sound.

I remember when "princess" telephones started. I wanted one desperately, though I wasn't exactly a princess.

[quote]I could punch in my phone number on a touch-tone phone simply by sound.

I could do it without looking at the buttons. But not thru sound...though numbers I was used to I could tell if I'd pressed the wrong number from the sound. I had a friend whose number played a little tune, but that was rare....as were numbers that spelled a word.

[quote]I remember when "princess" telephones started. I wanted one desperately, though I wasn't exactly a princess.

In American movies they often used to refer to them jokingly - "I HATE my princess phone" - I always wondered what they meant.

You could have googled.

This was before google, gurl.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Can someone explain R165 to me?

The displayed picture shows the queen on a landline---one that is decidedly NOT a princes phone.

Then when you click it is s short film of a car leaving what I am guessing is Buckingham palace.

I do not get what either is supposed to say

I still have my mother's white Princess phone with a rotary dial (somewhere.)

r165

The Queen's like: "I'm wearing a blue blue shirt, blue sweater and blue plaid skirt. Oh yeah I don't have undies. No, I've never done that, but I did say anything for $1.99 a minute"

Pretty sure the the Queen's office phone doesn't have a rotary dial or a keypad, just one button to call the palace switchboards who then dial the number and the pass the call to her.

You can't have HM waiting for anyone to answer or getting a busy signal.

What's the story, Morning Glory? What's the word, Hummingbird?

[quote] [R21], granted that that is a commercial from the phone company, but... We all complain today about people being on their phones and not "in the present." Yet, here in 1963 (the year of my birth), here's a woman in the middle of a party making a phone call!

She was showing off her touch tone phone - they're all freaking out about it, I'll bet it was her party piece for a pretty long time. I was pretty taken aback the first time I saw one...and that it played music when you dialed! OMG!

[quote] I heard people died because it took so long to dial the emergency number

this is the dumbest thing ever written

[quote] They are called ring back numbers and it varied from company to company. It was usually like 796-xxxx and the last four digits were your number. You'd hear a weird stuttering dial tone then you'd hang up and it'd ring

In the 90s my local phone company (Bell Atlantic, maybe?) had a service where you could get another number, but it wasn't another whole line. When that number was dialed, it would ring on your existing line, but with a different ring. You weren't billed for an entire second number, but I think it was like $10 a month or something as an added service.

I used to give my tricks that number and/or share it on chat lines.

In England it was 999 - one of the longest numbers to dial on a rotary phone

I love the sudden violence at the end of the "Goin' Steady" number - it's like an alien death ray hits them and they all disintegrate.

If you know how to operate a rotary phone you are in a high-risk group for COVID-19.

Probably not yet outside of the US, we still had rotary phones in Europe until about 1985 (later in Mediterranean Countries).

We used to have a switch on the back of our first push button phones so that they could use either system.

By the time I was in my mid-teens, touchtone phones had come in. I certainly knew how to use rotary, but most of my life has been spent with touch tone.

Akin to the Dustbowl towards the end of the Great Depression, OP.

Does anyone remember that time in the early 1980s when long-distance companies sprang up to cut your long distance bills?

Rather than dialing 1-213-555-1212 and getting charged by Ma Bell, services like MCI would have you dial them first at some number like 10-810, you'd get a second dial tone, then you'd dial your number. It was quite a bit cheaper than the regular phone company.

Calling long distance required special permission in my house. Hard to believe but it was quite expensive.

I remember that r180.

We could call friends we grew up with who'd moved to Detroit in the early 60's - the dad was in the advertising business - for ten minutes on Sunday afternoons when the long-distance rates were cheapest.

It's strange to think that I can remember when all of NJ was one area code (201). I remember I could call my cousins on our rotary phone in north Jersey from the shore with no area code. (Their number was SWathmore 8-7544). When I was working at AT&T in the late 80's and early 90's, whenever an area code was added anywhere in the country, it was a BIG deal. It was called an NPA split (Numbering Plan Area). Central office equipment, switches and software everywhere had to be updated and took months of testing. The actual cut over to the new NPA was pretty dramatic.

[quote]R183 When I was working at AT&T in the late 80's and early 90's, whenever an area code was added anywhere in the country, it was a BIG deal.

r180, my parents took advantage of that when my brother & I were in high school... I had to make my long-distance calls using MCI, and my brother had to make HIS using Sprint, to keep the bills separate. It sucked for me, because Sprint was 1c/minute cheaper. After I threw a tantrum, my dad agreed to pay me the difference because it was totally worth ~70c/month for him to be able to keep our billing separated.

I forget which companies later did it, but I'm pretty sure both Sprint & MCI eventually launched sub-services whose codes differed by 1 sequential digit marketed DIRECTLY to families, so every family member had their own code (enforced by an honor system).

At one point, AT&T had an extra-cost service that allowed the account holder to enable a range of 3-9 digit numbers, or individual PIN codes. You'd dial the number, then get a second stuttered dialtone to enter the code/pin. It was marketed to businesses that wanted to track/bill calls by client, parents wanting to track calls by teens/others, like a nanny), and colleges that needed to track calls by individual students from shared dorm phones.

No one's mentioned call waiting.

I arrived in the USA in 1983 and most people had it in NYC by then- the trouble was, you couldn't turn it off - so you'd be making the most important call of your life and you'd get this endless clicking noise.

It gave these gurls a whole lot to talk about back in '77

Speaking of dorm phones... my university's phone system was an antiquated mess in the early 90s.

My freshman year, there was just one line & number per 2 double rooms (singles got their own line), limited by lack of numbers at the campus' phone exchange. It was a sore point for years, especially once modems became popular.

My sophomore year, there was still 1 shared line per pair of rooms, but each room had 2 more lines (one per student). The catch was, they had n1n-0xxx numbers that couldn't be dialed from off-campus, so your parents & people calling from cell phones had to call the shared phone (and you'd presumably then call them back from your own line).

Halfway into Fall semester, the new inbound routing bridge came online... off-campus callers could dial a public number, dial YOUR n1n-0xxx number, and your phone would ring. Except... it could only actively deal with one inbound call at a time, so for 5-15 seconds (while the inbound caller was entering your number), everyone ELSE calling the number got a busy signal. So it was basically useless.

My Junior year, they finally fixed the bridge to handle enough simultaneous inbound calls to work 99% of the time. They also ran ethernet to all dorm rooms over the summer (previously, if you wanted ethernet in your room, you had to pay $250 and they'd send out someone to pull a cable to your room that remained for subsequent inhabitants to use for free). They finally wired everyone because students were pulling their own ethernet cables & stapling them along the walls & ceiling in the hall to switches plugged into the jacks that already existed from prior residents.

My senior year, it finally became possible for "most" people to directly dial our dorm numbers from off-campus, though some kids' parents lived in areas that still couldn't route long-distance calls to xxx-n1n-0xxx numbers properly.

The year after I graduated, the university started assigning numbers to residents that followed you as long as you lived on campus, and began planning the VoIP campus phone system that ended up being completely moot due to cell phones by the time it was finally ready.

When they finally decommissioned the legacy phone system around 2002 (still with 2+1 lines per room, though by that point the old line shared by 2 rooms was forgotten by almost everyone besides engineering majors who made a point of trying to hack it), they told students they'd have to buy a $250 phone that plugged into the network jack & had a legacy FXS jack for other phone devices to use if they wanted campus phone service. Supposedly, not a single student bought one (by then, everyone had cell phones).

I heard that millions died waiting for the dial to return.

[quote]we always had 911, way way back in the 1960s

Since 1968 to be precise, R146, because that's when the emergency system was created. But it wasn't implemented everywhere at once. It didn't arrive where I live until the late 70s, and we still had our taupe-colored wall-mounted rotary dial phone until 1983. Replacing it required re-wiring with a kit, and replacing the wall jacks with modular ones in each phone-line-equipped room, something my nineteen-year-old self was appointed to do in my household.

The hand receivers on those old Southwestern Bell telephones were amazingly hard and durable; one could drive a sixteen penny nail into a block of wood with one. In a pinch, they made impressive weapons. Defensively used, of course. ;)

You could catch the Covid19 from using a landline.

r190 Only if it was a party line.

Well you youniz. I don't recall because our first phone had no dial. You picked up the receiver and the operator answered. We had a major advancement with the crank phone. Been using that ever since. Can't wait to get one of those phones you can carry in your pocket.

With corded phones, you could actually hear your own voice through the earpiece of the receiver. With smartphones, you just hear it in the room. There wasn’t the issue of timing. You could hear both sides of a conversation even if one person talked over the other. I used to spend hours talking on the phone, but now I can’t stand even brief calls.

r193, the Motorola Photon/Electron used to emulate that very behavior. Moto even patented its use in cell phones. The problem was, they wouldn't license it to anyone else, and the parent company retained ownership of it after Motorola Mobility's sale to Lenovo, so now NOBODY can use it until the patent expires.

Moto also owns a patent for a way to signal to a cell phone that it should generate "comfort noise" when there's silence in the bitstream.

We had two 7s and two 9s in our phone number growing up. It seemed to take forever to dial our parents to come pick us up from someplace. The main prefix in our little suburb was 891. I swear the housewives developed scar tissue on the tips of their index fingers. Still, I miss the rotary phones. I have my grandparents’ phone sitting on an end table for decoration. The young folks look at it strangely.

[quote]Well you youniz. I don't recall because our first phone had no dial. You picked up the receiver and the operator answered.

You know there are ADULTS now who don't know what an "operator" is. I kid you not

I'm pre-rotary phone when one had to pick up the phone and wait for the operator to come on and ask what number you wanted.

For dramatic effect you hollered 'operator! operator!' while jiggling one of the cradle buttons the handpiece rests on when not in use.

[quote]I'm pre-rotary phone when one had to pick up the phone and wait for the operator to come on and ask what number you wanted.

Where on earth did you live? Dials were introduced in the 1920s.

NOTiCE: Early dials had numbers only and no letters

[quote] I swear the housewives developed scar tissue on the tips of their index fingers.

Were pencils forbidden in your house?

R194, that’s interesting, thanks. I thought it was just the inner workings of mobile/smart phones.

Tragic, and coveted too.

Despite the fact that most people now use mobile phones, advertising still tells people to dial '1' in front of the area code. This is completely unnecessary on mobile phones.

This tired shit again?

[quote]I wish I could hang up on the Kindegays who start these stupid threads.

Why? There is a whole generation of adults who have never used a rotary phone. Maybe some people are curious as to what it's like.

Next up: What was it like to use CARBON PAPER?

I'll go one better, R205. Mimeograph machines in our schools. Do you remember the smell of the ink? Sometimes the paper wasn't dry yet, and the ink would smudge and get on our fingers.

You needed a pencil to dial

During this whole shelter-at-home thing, I've been watching old Perry Mason reruns. Lots of rotary dialing. For some reason, I'm finding it comforting.

r203's pencil must have slipped when she dialed. She did not mean to connect to this thread.

OK Zoomers. The phones worked quite well and we did not have the phone up our nose or in our face when walking across the street.

On TV and stage they didn't want to dial a realistic number because it took too long. So it seemed like every phone number was 1,2,1,1,1,1 etc

[quote] On TV and stage they didn't want to dial a realistic number because it took too long.

They also never give anyone a chance to get to the phone and answer it. Phones were corded and most homes had one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom so it took awhile to get to the phone. Yet whenever someone in the movies or on stage makes a call, they barely finish dialing before they start in talking