Kids’ Reactions to Old-School Rotary Phone

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
If you want proof that you are old school, check out the video of kids’ reaction to a not-so-old-technology that is foreign to the new generation of techno-kiddies. It’s just a phone kids, don’t be so afraid to try something ‘new’. :D
 
Last edited:
Family had a slim one, can't remember in the dial was on the base or handset.
The good old days of being a tot playing with it....
I think pulse dialing is discontinued now? Not to sure.
 
On a related matter, I was wondering if you still have "Operators" in America ?
Like we see in all American movies when someone uses a phone,

"Hello, Operator ??? could you connect me to......." ?

Just wondering :)
 
I love when he mentions pay phones. I used to use those in high school ALL the time. I was pissed when it went up from 25¢ to 35¢. Having to find an extra dime was always a PITA.
 
hot chick's phone number is 989-890-9009

fuck that, not worth it.
 
How do all these kids have iPhones? I only use a BBerry and don't have a personal phone because I thought it was too damn expensive... what kind of jobs do they have that they can afford a $300+ device?
 
BOTA:49 said:
I love when he mentions pay phones. I used to use those in high school ALL the time. I was pissed when it went up from 25¢ to 35¢. Having to find an extra dime was always a PITA.
Click to expand...

LOL, dude that was the most inconvenient thing ever!
 
I still have a rotary phone in my bedroom. Still works perfectly. Try that with an iPhone in 30-40 years.

To provide the phone line for my landline phones, I'm using a Bluetooth gateway that connects to my cell phone, so I guess I'm kind of cheating. I love the real bell ringer in that phone though. :)
 
Used to carry a quarter in my back pocket for payphones thankfully i don't need to anymore.
 
The family auto repair shop still has a rotary phone. They have awesome bells that can be heard over an air wrench.

It's funny as hell when a teenager walks in and asks to use the phone.

We don't actually use it for outgoing calls since automated phone systems can't handle pulse anymore.
 
Ducman69 said:
How do all these kids have iPhones? I only use a BBerry and don't have a personal phone because I thought it was too damn expensive... what kind of jobs do they have that they can afford a $300+ device?
Click to expand...

This was my thought as well..especially when the kid who looked no more than 8 was like "I prefer my iPhone". I was like..wtf does an 8 year old need an iphone for? My 8 year old has a standard flip phone..that she gets to use when she is going to be overnight somewhere. That's it..She is 8...not 16.
 
MindBuster said:
On a related matter, I was wondering if you still have "Operators" in America ?
Like we see in all American movies when someone uses a phone,

"Hello, Operator ??? could you connect me to......." ?

Just wondering :)
Click to expand...
Its refered to as 411 or "information" now
 
BOTA:49 said:
I love when he mentions pay phones. I used to use those in high school ALL the time. I was pissed when it went up from 25¢ to 35¢. Having to find an extra dime was always a PITA.
Click to expand...

I remember when it went from 20c to 25c. I went from being able to make 5 calls for a dollar, to 4.
 
Imagine what ridiculous responses youngsters (especially teens/20's) these days would give if asked what they thought a party line was. :rolleyes:
 
Like that wasn't all scripted.. makes the HOVr video look legit!!

I must be old.. I was close to 30 before I had a phone that wasn't a rotary version. And I still remember my house phone numbers and phone numbers of friends from the 1960s & 70s!!

I also remember spending my school spring breaks traveling from Boston to my grandparent's very rural cotton farm in Georgia. And every so often the telephone would ring but no one would pick it up!! I would run around yelling "the phone is ringing" but all they would say is "it isn't for us". I would think "how do you know it isn't for us if you don't pick up the phone!!" I didn't understand the concept of a "party line" which was when a bunch of houses shared the same telephone connection, and how you knew the call was for YOU was that each house had it's own distinct phone ring.

Lily_Tomlin.jpg
 
none of these kids had the little Fischer Price telephone rotary telephone toy? Do they even make that anymore?
 
I had a rotary phone as late as 1994. Though there were also touch-tone phones in the house as well.
 
I don't think those even work with the local phone company in Vancouver. Need a touch tone phone.
 
My grandparents had a dark red rotary phone as their only home phone (2 story, 7 bedroom old farm house). They were 1 of 3 homes in the entire county that still used pulse dialing service, and the phone company continued to oblige. This was up to about 12 years ago. Looked similar to this:




Growing up in a military family overseas, we had a very old Western Electric model of tone dial phone...I think it was gloss black with dark grey buttons. We never had cordless home phones until some of the first inexpensive self-contained compact cell phones hit the market and drove the prices down on land-line phones.
 
That was *so* cute and funny!

Rotary phones were so cumbersome. When I would use the 9 key, the entire phone would move, so I would have to hold down the base.

I hated everything about analogue ( phones, audio cassettes, vinyl ). Analogue multi meters were useful, when measuring fluctuating values but that was about it.
 
Spire3660 said:
I remember when it went from 20c to 25c. I went from being able to make 5 calls for a dollar, to 4.
Click to expand...

I remember when arcade machines did that. I think that the reaction in my mind was something like, "Wow, you greedy cock suckers".

Also, the British currency never had a quarter coin, so I think it was something like 2 x 10 pence piece + a 5 pence piece ( 3 coins just for 1 credit ). It was a huge hassle. I remember running around and asking people for change.
 
Shit I am over 30 years old and I've never seen a rotary phone in person.
 
DejaWiz said:
My grandparents had a dark red rotary phone as their only home phone (2 story, 7 bedroom old farm house). They were 1 of 3 homes in the entire county that still used pulse dialing service, and the phone company continued to oblige. This was up to about 12 years ago. Looked similar to this:

...
Click to expand...
Just like the White House, Batphone, Antphone, etc.
 
We had a rotary dial until after I went to college. Remember when the phone company used to actually own the phones, and you leased them? If you wanted to put a add a second phone (not a second line, a second phone), you had to call them in to send a tech to your house to do it.

One of the books I read to my 5-year old is one I still have from when I was a kid. Its called “Busy People” and introduces kids to the several careers: policeman, teacher, fireman, etc. One of them is “Irma Installer”, a phone installation tech. They diagram the parts of a rotary phone, and show Irma working with one and installing a new phone in a house. The first time I read it to my son, he was completely baffled by both the illustrations and the description of her job. He'd just seen me run a bunch of phone line and CAT6a in the attic, and asked me why Irma hadn't had to come and do it. It took me a half-hour to explain :D
 
I just want to know why in SE Michigan its more expensive to call across town than across the country?
 
There is a lot of technology that anyone born prior to the transition to PCs in every home will be familiar with, but the teenagers now will be completely baffled by. VHS, rotary phones and party lines, diskettes, Zip drives, and even tube televisions and rabbit ears. Let alone more 'exotic' things like tube radios, records, word processors and typewriters, telegrams, teletext, and so much more. Hell, at 26 I get odd looks when I tell people my age I learned how to type on a word processor and they think I'm talking about a PC running Word. I wish my dad's nice Brother typewriter hadn't died (the electrics went) as it was always fun to type on it. I imagine I'd have fun using it for manuscripts. I mean, I've seen people older than me completely stumped by RCA cables even though they're color coded. There are some pretty big generational gaps since the 19th century due to the acceleration of technology.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
This was my thought as well..especially when the kid who looked no more than 8 was like "I prefer my iPhone". I was like..wtf does an 8 year old need an iphone for? My 8 year old has a standard flip phone..that she gets to use when she is going to be overnight somewhere. That's it..She is 8...not 16.
Click to expand...

*In old man voice* When I was young! :p
 
melteye said:
*In old man voice* When I was young! :p
Click to expand...

While I understand where you are coming from, the point isn't really applicable. I understand the need for kids to have a cellphone, however a cellphone and a $200+ smart phone are two entirely different things. Most adults I know don't even need the smart phone they have, much less an 8 year old.
 
MindBuster said:
On a related matter, I was wondering if you still have "Operators" in America ?
Like we see in all American movies when someone uses a phone,

"Hello, Operator ??? could you connect me to......." ?

Just wondering :)
Click to expand...

Yes. On most non-cell phone services, you can still dial 0 and get an operator. It is expensive though since they charge per minute.
 
I agree with the person about this being scripted. I will agree that the kids might not know what type of phone that is. As for a call being busy. That was actually something we were talking about at work a few weeks ago as one of the woman has 3 kids and they didn't know what that was. As for long distance I expect people to know what that is still as you still dial that on a home phone regardless and do still have people that pay per minute for it. Also kind of expect them to have used a home phone line at some point but then again seeing how many people we lose a month dropping land lines maybe not.

bucketlist said:
Family had a slim one, can't remember in the dial was on the base or handset.
The good old days of being a tot playing with it....
I think pulse dialing is discontinued now? Not to sure.
Click to expand...

Depends on where you are. We are in the process of replacing our analog switch with an IP Softswitch. For analog lines we can do either. Actually migrated a few people that were still using pulse dial into the switch and they worked just fine.

MindBuster said:
On a related matter, I was wondering if you still have "Operators" in America ?
Like we see in all American movies when someone uses a phone,

"Hello, Operator ??? could you connect me to......." ?

Just wondering :)
Click to expand...

Yes they do still exist. Like somebody else pointed out better to use 411 though as operator cost you more.
 
host: How did you send a text messages using this phone?
kid: :confused:
host: by using this handy little add-on device <grabs fax machine with handset cradle>
kid: :eek:
 
So who here had the longest phone cord? I was rocking about 75', but usually only had 30 of it untangled at any given time.
 
And to think. The phone companies still bill a surcharge for tone dial service LOL
 
Video does make a person feel old, but I'm not even 30 yet and we had one of those phones in the house. I didn't have a cell phone till 2003. By then though we had moved to touch tone phones.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top