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Vintage cellphone?

I've got two rotaries that have been in my shop since they were new.
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Ah yes, those newfangled dial phones sure did look modern. :)

Hehe. Actually, Chuck is older than I am so he probably also remembers when phones weren't automatic. The phone we had when I was a kid was a wooden box on the wall in the workshop and it had a handle on the side to call the operator. There was a little platform on the front where you could write a note. IIRC the lid on the "platform" was hinged and you could put paper and pencil in there so I guess that was the first "flip phone". Our phone number was 91.
 
I was a big-city boy, but stil remember both our phone number (Sheffield 2118-W) and my grandmother's number (she lived in rural Wisconsin): 46. Up there, the phone guys also repaired radios on the side. Ah, the days of small community phone systems...

I still have some old signs on my property where Ma Bell ran a coax toll line, with instructions to call some "Enterprise" number collect and ask for Operator such-and-so. Back when I was doing some road building, I called the cable locator service, who verified that the line wasn't even on the current inventory and was dead as a doornail. He said I was perfectly free to dig it up if I wanted.

Along the same route, I keep finding old glass insulators. Apparently they're not worth much, but they are pretty to look at.

I wonder how long it'll be before we all start using IPv6 addresses as phone numbers?

Hello, Central...
 
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Wow.. two digit phone numbers?! It's funny (sorta). I'm not sure where the generational gap would be, I would assume my younger brother (26) would remember the same as myself as we had a rotary phone in our small town Pratt and in Wisconsin when we were both very little. I remember in Pratt (it could just be a town size thing) but yeah we only had to dial 5 digits to get local numbers so I still remember a few. Later (wish I could think of an actual year but probably 1989?) they changed to 7 digit numbers which threw all of us kids off heh. But at our age, back then when Nick and Night meant black and white reruns we'd watch Lassy, Donna Reed, etc (as a kid I guess we didn't really care other than some of the words they used were a bit odd) we'd always see them charging their rotary phone with that side crank and then talking to the operator, or clicking the dial to dial a number on some other shows. I was pretty surprised my first time to try it and realize it still worked (long after rotary was not the standard). I was more surprised as a teen when I found the dtmf tones and generated them myself and put the phone up to my computer (stereo) speakers and got the phone to dial. It's probably common knowledge here but I don't think I would have ever guessed that it was truly tone based and thought the buttons actually sent some additional signal or short through the line.

Heh.. interesting (have to read about the insulators) but they are pretty. Certainly seem like an attractive item. Not to any surprise but quickly found a site for collectors of insulators (I guess also commonly found along bottle collectors) and upcoming shows (quite a lot more than one would think).
 
41 years old here and have always lived in a city so I can only remember the normal phone numbers. Our area code did change from 216 to 330 because Cleveland was getting too big and wanted the whole 216 area code. I do recall rotary phones.

As far as cell phones go, does anyone collect the old obsolete analog ones? I have a Nokia 100 with the box and manual (I think) I don't need.
 
Yeah, mid '30s city-dweller here, and my earliest memories were of 7-digit; we did have a couple rotaries, though. My wife's (Nebraska farmer) grandmother had a black Bell wall-mount rotary up until 2006. We went to visit, and I noticed it, and asked to see her phone bill. Yup, good ol' Ma Bell was still charging her $3.00 a month to rent it. Even worse, the actual "phone" part had been broken for YEARS. She only kept it because it had a nice loud actual-bell ringer.

We promptly went to the nearest Radio Shack (20 miles away,) and got her an extra loud ringer, plus a modern wall-mount phone.
 
Ok, trivia time.

Anyone know the reason why most of the earliest area codes issued for highly populated metropolitan areas were low numbers?

For example one of the oldest (I think it was the first) area codes for Chicago, IL is 312.

Also, 0 was considered a high number and seldom used.

Logical reason and should be fairly easy for the clever people here to figure out. :)

Tom
 
TomFCS said:
Ok, trivia time.

Anyone know the reason why most of the earliest area codes issued for highly populated metropolitan areas were low numbers?

For example one of the oldest (I think it was the first) area codes for Chicago, IL is 312.

Also, 0 was considered a high number and seldom used.

Logical reason and should be fairly easy for the clever people here to figure out. :)

Tom
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It took less time to dial, of course! Isn't NYC 212 or something like that?

Also, an area code never can start with a 1 (or 0).

Kyle
 
antiquekid3 said:
It took less time to dial, of course! Isn't NYC 212 or something like that?
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As an impatient teen I was always bothered by numbers with several zeros. To a speedy mind, you dial a zero, go put on the coffee, come back, and the dial has almost gotten all the way around. :)

It's funny though how some of that slowness persists in the phone world to this day - but not the same will to do something about it. For example, modems seem to come with very slow defaults for "dialing" speed, even with tone. I used to set the register (s11?) to as fast as possible because I don't have whatever it takes to accept the slow version. These "slowness" artefacts are even more absurd in the 21st century. In my area we only need 4 numbers. The whole area is on the same "exchange". Even then they force us to enter 6 extra, and completely useless numbers. I think this is done to give us an historical perspective.
 
antiquekid3 said:
It took less time to dial, of course! Isn't NYC 212 or something like that?

Also, an area code never can start with a 1 (or 0).
Click to expand...

My hunch is that it wasn't done for the convenience of the end customer, but rather for the telcos themselves. The old equipment got less wear from low numbers and got more usage time-wise from the lines. DDD didn't start to come in until about the mid 1950s, although there was a New Jersey pilot project around 1951. Some places didn't get DDD until the late 60s.

And I remember that initially we didn't have to dial "1"--all area codes had 1 or 0 as the middle number and the equipment was smart enough to figure that out. But it couldn't figure out your number (unless it had ANI installed), so you'd dial the DDD number, but still have to tell the operator what your own number was.

Initially, DDD was introduced to customers as a convenience feature--there was no difference in toll charges between a DDD call or one placed through the operator.
 
Without looking it up I thought it was just first come first serve for the area codes. Just like the country code which US is 1. I guess it could be by size though?
 
barythrin said:
Wow.. two digit phone numbers?! It's funny (sorta). . . .
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It wasn't even two digits. In the same little town, one of the grocery stores had number 1!
In small towns where you go through the operator anyway, you didn't really need numbers. For example, you might just ask the operator for the baker. Not only that, but the response might be: "he's not home, I just saw him go by".
 
Chuck(G) said:
My hunch is that it wasn't done for the convenience of the end customer, but rather for the telcos themselves. The old equipment got less wear from low numbers and got more usage time-wise from the lines.
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Looks like you pretty much nailed it. That was the explanation I got from a relative of mine who worked for Indiana Bell as a lineman years ago. I also found a reference here.

Tom
 
I know that it would certainly be an issue for the Strowger switch exchanges--they could and did wear out. But by the time DDD had been rolled out, almost everyone was on a 1XB or 5XB exchange. That would also imply that x0y form area codes were second-tier after x1y.

I discovered that the first DDD pilot in the US used 318 for the area code of San Francisco. Later, when DDD left the test stage, pretty much all of northwestern California was 415.

Anyone remember that the ZEnith exchange came before the "800" number? Same for "ENterprise".
 
When I was in elementary school (outer suburban Vancouver, Canada, 25 years ago), there was an old poster on the wall advising people to call ‘Zenith 555’ in the event of a forest fire. I never knew what it meant, or why a school in the middle of town would even feel a need to advise its students about forest fire procedures. The school itself was only about 20 years old, so it hadn’t been a vestige of the days before the neighbourhood was hacked out of the bush.
 
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