Number PULEAZE! Part Seven:

Automatic Washer - The world's coolest Washing Machines, Dryers and Dishwashers

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Reply #41

When I worked at University Hospital Cincinnati in 1985, they put a new phone system in the office area I was working in. Some of the stations were like the one in Western Electric ad, with 20 button phones and the separate busy lamp field - direct station selection consoles. It was one of the ComKey systems, and had electronic ringers instead of the gong type.
 
Re:#55

Yes Jack, and at $7.50 for 3 mins these Long Distance calls were damn expensive in 1967 too!  Minimum wage  was $1.35 an hr. in ‘67 so a 3 min call would have cost a min wage earner almost 6 hours of their earnings!

 

 People didn’t just causally pick up the phone and ideally talk on LD calls then.  They got down to business right away and these LD calls were of short duration, that  is unless you were wealthy.

 

Eddie
 
That was the other direction in 1991.

£1.00 is the equivalent of €3.31 / $3.55 - Still pretty damn expensive for 1 min. It didn't plummet until a quite a few years later.



They were all very tugging at the heart strings kind of ads.




Telecom was a still monopoly in those days, so lots of very nostalgically warm and fuzzy adverts. They didn't have to try very hard! The first one is featuring a Telecom Éireann branded GNT Automatic phone designed by Henning Andreasen in Denmark in the late 70s. They were one of the standard rental handsets from Telecom in the 80s - came in a range of colours, along side things like the Northern Telecom Harmony phones.

I still have one of these working flawlessly on modern VoIP, and it probably dates from about 1985.

The "R" button is the register recall for call waiting and 3-way calling.

Works a little differently here (and similarly in much of Europe).

R1 - Answer incoming waiting call, and release current call.
R2 - Answer incoming waiting call, and hold current call or toggle between calls.
R3 - Merge calls and setup a 3-way conversation.
R0 - Reject incoming call waiting (send to voicemail after that arrived in the 90s)

To make a 3 way call you called the first person, pressed R, called the second person and pressed R3 to merge. You could split the calls again and toggle with R2

Unlike a US hook flash, the R button sent a short pulse, similar to pulse dialling 1.

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