KIDS REACT TO ROTARY PHONES

[AquariusGuy]

 

Saw this and thought some people on here might get a kick out of this.

[Benji]

............... I remember when our phone was a party line, meaning you could pick up the phone and hear someone else using it. You'd hang up and wait for them to finish before you could make a call. Also our phone number (all of them in town) started with Dudley then are few digit numbers, I'm not real sure, but I think you called 0 for the operator for an emergency.   G-D, talk about showing your age!!

[AquariusGuy]

I've heard of party lines. My friends grandfather worked for the original Ma Bell back in the day. He wrote the manuals that taught people how to use their home phone.

 

I had family in land-line business so its only suitable I work in wireless

 

I have to point out... try finding a phone as durable as the rotatory phone they had. You could easily knock someone out with one.

[Tomas]

Ah yes!! The old rotary phones. I remember the first phone that we had when I was a kid. I still remember the phone number AL 4272. That was when they had exchanges with live operators. The AL in the number was for the Algiers exchange. If you wanted to call someone that was on a party-line you dialed the operator and told her the number and added the number of rings for that party. For Example: You would say Algiers 4272 ring four. The operator would cause the phone to ring 4 times and that party would know that the call was for them. 

 

Nostalgia... isn't it great.    

[methodwriter85]

   I have no idea how to use a rotary phone. They had one at my local library circa 1995 and someone had to dial it for me.

Edited March 4, 2014 by methodwriter85

[hh5]

i hated rotary phones because it took too long to dial while hurting the fingers after making too many phone calls.

You have no idea of how many pharmacist bosses I had to inform them to change over to digital dialing lines in order to improve their prescription processing.

It wasn't that long ago they processed prescription via paper or reel to reel tape.

 

Now the internet has changed everything no more MODEMS!!!

Edited March 4, 2014 by hh5

[hh5]

I am surprise most knew its an old phone. I guess it will be more amusing in like another ten or 20 years when the kids will react differently than today.

one day, museums will have this as a popular kids exhibit.

[Adam Phillips]

One of the functioning phones my grandparents have in their house is a rotary phone. Still. Outside of that, they weren't  common in my world, but I never felt stumped by them.

 

I can remember a light going on once in my head, so to speak, when I was a kid as I realized, "Ohhh....this is why we say we DIAL phone numbers."

[Bill W]

We had a party line too and a nosy neighbor that used to listen in on everyone's calls.  You had to learn the difference in the ring tones to know if the call was for your house.  There was one short for one family or one long for another.  Then someone else had one long and one short ring, while another family had either two short rings or to long rings.  You just couldn't pick up when the phone rang.  Our rotary phone was even an older style than the ones used in the clip and I remember when the touch-tone phones made them obsolete.  

 

When I was young, telephone numbers were just five digits.  Then before I was a teen, they added a two-letter prefix.  ST stood for Stillwell, PI was for Pioneer and RA was for Raymond, so if you told someone your phone number, you would say, "Call me at Pioneer 8-7432." 

 

It was fun to watch the kids reactions.  

Edited March 4, 2014 by Bill W

[Suvitar]

This was fun to watch and it´s amazing how much kids know about old things. 

[Slytherin]

I used a pencil when I dialed, because  my finger hurt 

[Kitt]

I can remember when grandma's party line changed over to a private line, one of the last towns to change. She had one of those nosy neighbors on the party line, who always picked up on gram's ring, especially if the rescue squat siren went off just before since gram was a nurse and she might find out some interesting gossip if the call was from the hospital calling gram in, Some glitch in the change over kept her connected to gram for a long while after it was supposed to go private. Drove my grandpa nuts!

[Daddydavek]

This is what the telephone looked like in my grandmother's house until they moved in 1960.

 

 

It didn't have the modern connector at the end of the cord as it was hardwired into their line.   That phone was about 30 years old when they moved and it never once had a service problem.

[Mann Ramblings]

That video is just painful to watch. I can feel my age increasing by leaps and bounds every second I view it. Thanks.

[Gene Splicer PHD]

I always hated calling my friend Tim because his number had a zero and a 9 in it, it was such a pain - dial ALL the way around, then WAIT for it to come back, then dial AGAIN ugh

 

AND THEN IT WOULD BE BUSY BECAUSE HIS SISTER WAS ALWAYS ON THE PHONE

 

/firstworldproblemsfromthe70s

Edited March 4, 2014 by Gene Splicer PHD

[Kitt]

LOL   Grams's number had a 7, 8 and two 0's! Took forever to dial it, especially for a young kid!  Frustrating when your finger slips out half way around the dial on the last 0 and you have to hang up and start over!

[Sasha Distan]

i love that kid in the grey shirt who knew it was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. nawwww!!!! I want a son like him!

[Ashi]

I used rotary phone when I was a kid, then they made the fake rotary phones.  So instead of the rotary, they have buttons in places of the holes where the number would be on a rotary phone....  Now you have to go to Crates and Barrels to buy one of those fake rotary phones, which made me happy when I first saw they still have those old phones.  Nostalgia attack.  LOL.

 

And modem.  LOL.  My brother and I used to get a riot out of faking modem dial sound.  Do do do do do do do, (fart), beeeeeeeep, dong dong (squeak).  You young kids won't get what I am talking about.  I ain't crazy, you young 'uns :shaking fist:.

[Thorn Wilde]

My grandmother still has an avocado green rotary phone. She's allergic to buttons. My grandparents still have three landline phones in their house, but my grandmother will always run to the rotary phone when it rings, and if she's making a call, she will always use that phone. None of their landline phones are wireless. The other two are the early 90s kind with buttons and a curly cord. I always loved my grandmother's rotary phone when I was a kid, and would use it if I ever needed to make a call from their house.

 

I remember when we got ISDN when I was about 9 or 10, which meant that we could go on the Internet and talk on the phone at the same time. Wow! Before that we had a 56k modem. Ah, those were the days... And then we got a phone with a wireless handset a couple of years later. I didn't get a mobile phone until I was thirteen, so I was used to using landlines. 

 

Magpie and I are just about the only people my age I know who even have a landline, and that's because for some reason the mobile connection in our house is really bad. Mostly the only people who call us on the landline are our respective mothers.

Edited March 4, 2014 by Thorn Wilde

[hh5]

here's how they made phone calls in the old days

 

Edited March 4, 2014 by hh5

[Palantir]

Bill W -When I was young, telephone numbers were just five digits.  Then before I was a teen, they added a two-letter prefix.  ST stood for Stillwell, PI was for Pioneer and RA was for Raymond, so if you told someone your phone number, you would say, "Call me at Pioneer 8-7432." 

 

Five digits - how about one?

When our family lived in a small country town over 40 yrs ago our phone number was '2'.

My sister traveled to Europe where, at the time, phone numbers were enormous by Australian standards, and had great trouble convincing the local telephonists (now there's a redundant occupation) that a connection could be made with the name of the town followed by a single digit.

[K.C.]

We had a party line when I was a kid, but thank god we got a private like when I was an early teenager cause I would hate for anyone to have listened into some of my conversations.  Also had a super-extra-long cord because you had to try and stretch as far as you could to have some privacy.  My grandparents had a rotary dial.  I hated it.  I was so impatient and wouldn't wait for the dial to get all they way back and would end up dialing wrong numbers all the time

 

I remember one time my daughter had to call my mom on a touch-tone phone.  She was so confused and kept asking where's the speed-dial/contact number.  I told her she had to actually dial/press the buttons   She thought I was joking! 

[Sympathia]

There was 1 phone in our entire town in Germany back in 1995 when we moved to Sweden. ^^

[Zombie]

There was 1 phone in our entire town in Germany back in 1995 when we moved to Sweden. ^^

 

That'd be a one-horse town then

 

Magpie and I are just about the only people my age I know who even have a landline, and that's because for some reason the mobile connection in our house is really bad. Mostly the only people who call us on the landline are our respective mothers.

 

In Britain you have to have a landline in order to get an affordable broadband connection

 

I can remember a light going on once in my head, so to speak, when I was a kid as I realized, "Ohhh....this is why we say we DIAL phone numbers."

 

Same reason people leave the phone "off the hook" and "hang up" after a call - from the old days when the ear piece used to dangle from a hook

[Celethiel]

my grandma had one of those as a toy when i was a kid..... I broke her vase with it

my great Grandmother actually had one she still used (same timeperiod) in fact i think it was still in her house when she died hooked up to the line...

and Yes I know how to use one