A Rotary Phone & A Challenge

[TNK]

https://interestingengineering.com/v...t-rotary-phone

[beenalongtime]

I figured the challenge, would be to build one:
https://www.engadget.com/2020-02-18-...ing-after.html

[farscott]

I remember when my daughter asked, "Why is it called 'dialing" a number?" Being born in 1994, she had never seen a rotary phone.

[Gater]

I remember when my daughter asked, "Why is it called 'dialing" a number?" Being born in 1994, she had never seen a rotary phone.

Worse: I remember the first time when one of my co-workers revealed they had never seen one...and that was a long time ago. #old

[SecondsCount]

I thought the phone companies did away with rotary dialing and went to tone only?

My parents moved into a house in the 80s that had a rotary phone, and it still worked.

[LOKNLOD]

My dad used a rotary dial phone at his mechanic shop all the way into the late 90's. The amount of business calls requiring pushing buttons eventually forced him to get a touch-tone phone for the office. He still had a rotary out in the shop for calling the parts house though. I think later he did have to get a touch tone out there too because the stopped supporting the rotary dial tone.

[Jim Watson]

Failure of Anticipation:
Arthur C. Clarke wrote a far future story in which he said:
In every room was a device which would have been instantly recognized for 5000 years, the ten position rotary dial.

On the other hand, Heinlein equipped Luna City phones with alphanumeric keypads long before the smartphone.
The cheapest phone code was a random sequence. For a small premium, it would be pronounceable although still nonsense. For more money, you could spell your name or business.

[HCM]

https://interestingengineering.com/v...t-rotary-phone

The video embedded in the linked article was cherry picked with the two least successful teens to draw traffic to their site.

If you look at the longer original video most teens figures it out in about a minute.

[whomever]

I thought the phone companies did away with rotary dialing and went to tone only?

My parents moved into a house in the 80s that had a rotary phone, and it still worked.

My rotary worked the last time I tried it, a year or two ago. Time to test again!

I have heard they PhoneCo can stop supporting rotary dialing on an exchange after a certain time period with no rotary calls made. If so, they are probably about ready to take out a contract on me.


In the ??1990s??, when POTS service was common but most people had switched to cordless handhelds, when we had a power outage the neighbors used us (and our rotary phone) as a phone bank to call their kids and say they were OK. Now they just come over to charge their cell phones :-).

The old Ma Bell phones were some awesome engineering. When they were built, the PhoneCo owned the phone, so any outage was a service call for them, at their expense. Some time in the late 1970's they stopped renting them to people, and just told customers to keep their existing phones. That phone still works (and, mind you, it wasn't new when I got it). Compare that to the typical MTBF of a current handset.

[BehindBlueI's]

Phone lines weren't ran out by our house until 1986. My maternal grandparents had a phone and it was a party line. You could dial your own number on a rotary, hang up, and a few seconds later your phone would start to ring. You then released the cradle and you had an open line with yourself. My grandfather ran a line out to the barn and hung up a phone. There was also one in the summer kitchen. You could then call around the farm by the above trick. The issue was you couldn't tell when the other person answered, since it would ring until the phone that dialed was "answered". The rule was call, let it ring 6 times, then answer and see if the other person answered. If they hadn't you waited a bit and repeated the process if they didn't call you back.

Completely unrelated, but my maternal grandfather worked for General Electric and "the farm" was his weekend/summer property. He had the first microwave I ever saw, and also the first VCR. I assume they fell off an assembly line, but I don't actually know. That microwave was over thirty years old when it outlived both of them. It was big and heavy, but it worked a treat. It lived in Louisville, then in the summer kitchen at the farm, then at their house they moved to in retirement. I've no idea who took it afterward, but I figure it's still working whoever did.