I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?
You want to feel really old?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok
Rotary phones weren’t even that long ago?!??! I still remember the swooop, click-click-click-click sound, oh, and the ear shattering ringing bells. I am happy that in our lifetime we’ve come so far that kids don’t understand tools from just a couple decades ago. I remember my father showing me a stack of punch cards he used at work and warning me not to touch them - but what I also know is, that those kids better get the hell off my damn lawn!
Fun fact: You could dial without even using the rotary. In a morse-code-like fashion, quickly click the hang-up knob the number you want with a pause in-between numbers. So if you were calling 558-9151 (remember 7 digit numbers‽), you’d do (c = click):
c-c-c-c-c
c-c-c-c-c
c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c
c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c
c
c-c-c-c-c
c
I would probably have similar difficulties… I can’t even tell what they were doing wrong and then suddenly doing right. I do know the basic motion because I’ve seen it in shows I think, like you spin it around… but I never really thought about how precisely you do that. And you only had a certain amount of time to dial it?? That’s crazy.
I will say I would have figured out you need to pick it up first sooner. But even my office phone I dial the number, see it on the little screen, hit send, and then lift up the receiver if I don’t want to use speaker phone.
They were starting by putting a finger in zero and then dragging to the number. And for zero they were dragging all the way to the stop.
You’re supposed to dial by putting a finger in each number hole and then dragging to the stop. So they dialed zero correctly, but only zero.
Hey, they did a good job, and no one was being mean about it. That’s nice.
Man rotary phones were the best! Such a joy to dial.
I had one in my room! Such a good feel to it. Same with picking up and hanging up!
This was in the early 2000s, btw. They were already relics, but landlines were still commonly used when I was in high school, and it had such a handsome look to it and felt great to use. I have long thought that a product that would do incredibly well would be a cell phone charging dock where you put your phone in and while it’s charging it just acts like a landline rotary phone. The user experience is very, very gratifying, and if you’ve ever tried to hold a call while your phone is plugged into the wall you know how much better a solid headset with a coil wire would feel than that.