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Today’s youngsters will never know what it was like to place a phone call before the invention of push button phones and smartphones with touchscreens.
If you’re old enough to remember using a rotary dial telephone you probably remember what it was like to dial each number manually and then have to wait for the dial to return to its original position before you could dial the next number.
Dialing the numbers 1, 2 or 3 was no big deal – the dial “returned home” quickly when you dialed those. But dialing a 7, 8 or 9 took what seemed like an eternity. And if you had to make a “long distance” call (which typically required dialing a total of 11 numbers), it seemed like the chickens would come home to roost before your call was placed.
You also probably remember the clicking sounds you heard over the receiver after every number was dialed. I remember counting the clicks just to pass the time.
Of course there was the “party line” situation that was even more frustrating at times, but for someone like me who hates to wait for mundane things to happen, dialing a number on a rotary telephone was no fun.
And then there was the choice of colors…
Like the classic Model T automobile from Ford, you could have your phone in any color you wanted – as long as it was black!
But all the above said, that was actually the golden era of telephone service. For most people back then telephone service was a novelty. When was I was a youngster not every home had a telephone and it was always a really big deal when they finally got one. It was almost like stepping out of the stone age into the modern world.
Telephones and telephone service have both evolved into the wireless smartphone era and the change has been nothing short of amazing in terms of convenience, but there’s still a part of me that misses the old rotary dial phones of the past, frustrations and all.
To finish up, here’s a short video that just might bring back a bit of that nostalgic past. Watch, and enjoy…