Quote from: quiller on November 21, 2010, 12:29:37 PM
I have used a wall-mounted crank telephone, as a boy, and experienced part lines firsthand --- but I found it funny trying to teach my wife's then-young son how to operate an actual rotary dial phone. Now an adult, he gets a kick out of watching his wife try to operate that same device.

Some day, we'll be explaining what those funny poles with all those wires were, in an age of wi-fi everything.

I am some what like q using the wall-mounted crank telephone but used it for about 10 years.   The last time I used one was when I was about 15 years of age.  When we moved into what we call the big city back then they had nice new black rotary dial phones with number and letters. You could even have a Private Line if you ask for it but then it cost more.  But then we also had  crystal radio.

We had a crank as well, but couldn't afford phone service.
Wish I would have snagged that thing.

Hey, remember back in the late 70s/ early 80s when push-button phones were just starting?

Around the same time, people started buying their phones from someone other than the phone companies. Of course, the phone companies didn't much like that...

In southern Ohio, where your choice for a phone company could be GTE, or GTE, or GTE, the folks at GTE would ask you, not if you wanted "pulse" (analog) or "tone" (digital) service, but whether your phone had buttons on it. Most of the button phones of the day were actually "pulse" phones; they were programmed to send out the same "pulse" interrupter signals as the old rotary phones. But if you told GTE that you were using a push-button phone, you were automatically assigned a "tone" line with digital capability, and you were charged extra for that.

It was a scam that floated around for a while, got some attention at the PUCO (Public Utilities Commission of Ohio), but never really went anywhere. Prolly didn't amount to over a million or two dollars....