General Electric 1984
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Number PULEAZE! Part Three:
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Bell Telephone System 1962
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American Telephone and Telegraph Company 1911
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General Telephone & Electronics 1963
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Western Electric 1965
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American Telephone & Telegraph Company 1923
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Bell Telephone System 1937
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Bell Telephone System 1961
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AT&T 1968
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Convenient card dialer phone
Was this ever a thing? Inquiring minds want to know more.
Sarah
Was this ever a thing? Inquiring minds want to know more.
Sarah
appliguy
Well-known member
Yes, Sarah there really was a card dialer telephone
It was made for offices and the cards had the most frequently called phone number punched in them and you would insert the card in the slot push the button and the Card Dialer Phone would dial the number for you much quicker then you could do it by hand. PATRICK COFFEY
It was made for offices and the cards had the most frequently called phone number punched in them and you would insert the card in the slot push the button and the Card Dialer Phone would dial the number for you much quicker then you could do it by hand. PATRICK COFFEY
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Ha!
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<h1 class="c-article-header__hed">How the Loss of the Landline Is Changing Family Life</h1>
The shared phone was a space of spontaneous connection for the entire household.
December 12, 2019
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My tween will never know the sound of me calling her name from another room after the phone rings. She'll never sit on our kitchen floor, refrigerator humming in the background, twisting a cord around her finger while talking to her best friend. I'll get it, He's not here right now, and It's for you are all phrases that are on their way out of the modern domestic vernacular. According to the federal government, the majority of American homes now use cellphones exclusively. “We don't even have a landline anymore,” people began to say proudly as the new millennium progressed. But this came with a quieter, secondary loss—the loss of the shared social space of the family landline.
“The shared family phone served as an anchor for home,” says Luke Fernandez, a visiting computer-science professor at Weber State University and a co-author of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter. “Home is where you could be reached, and where you needed to go to pick up your messages.” With smartphones, Fernandez says, “we have gained mobility and privacy. But the value of the home has been diminished, as has its capacity to guide and monitor family behavior and perhaps bind families more closely together.”
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The home telephone was a communal invention from the outset. “When the telephone rang, friends and family gathered ’round, as mesmerized by its magic flow of electrons as they would later be by the radio,” according to Once Upon a Telephone, a lighthearted 1994 social history of the technology. After the advent of the telephone, in the late 19th century, and through the mid-20th century, callers relied on switchboard operators who knew their customers’ voices, party lines were shared by neighbors (who would often eavesdrop on one another's conversations), and phone books functioned as a sort of map of a community.
The early telephone’s bulky size and fixed location in the home made a phone call an occasion—often referred to in early advertisements as a “visit” by the person initiating the call. (One woman quoted in Once Upon a Telephone recalls the phone as having the “stature of a Shinto shrine” in her childhood home.) There was phone furniture—wooden vanities that housed phones in hallways of homes, and benches built for the speaker to sit on so they could give their full attention to the call. Even as people were defying time and space by speaking with someone miles away, they were firmly grounded in the space of the home, where the phone was attached to the wall.
Over the course of the 20th century, phones grew smaller, easier to use, and therefore less mystical and remarkable in their household presence. And with the spread of cordless phones in the 1980s, calls became more private. But even then, when making a call to another household’s landline, you never knew who would pick up. For those of us who grew up with a shared family phone, calling friends usually meant first speaking with their parents, and answering calls meant speaking with any number of our parents’ acquaintances on a regular basis. With practice, I was capable of addressing everyone from a telemarketer to my mother's boss to my older brother's friend—not to mention any relative who happened to call. Beyond developing conversational skills, the family phone asked its users to be patient and participate in one another’s lives.
Cellphones, which came on the market in the ’80s and gained popularity in the ’90s, rendered all of this obsolete as they displaced landlines. When kids today call “home,” they may actually be calling one parent and bypassing the other; friends and bosses and telemarketers (if they get through) usually reach exactly the person they are hoping to speak with. Who will be on the other end of the line is no longer a mystery.
What’s more, the calls, texts, and emails that pass through cellphones (and computers and tablets) can now be kept private from family members. “It keeps everybody separate in their own little techno-cocoons,” says Larry Rosen, a retired psychology professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills and a co-author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Whereas early landlines united family members gathered in a single room, cellphones now silo them.
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Cheryl Muller, a 59-year-old artist living in Brooklyn, raised her two sons, now 30 and 27, during the transition from landline to cellphone. “I do remember the shift from calling out ‘It's for you,’ and being aware of their friends calling, and then asking them what the call was about, to pretty much … silence,” she says. Caroline Coleman, 54, a writer in New York City whose children grew up during the same transition, recalls how at age 10 her son got a call from a man with a deep voice. “I was horrified. I asked who it was—and it was his first classmate whose voice had changed,” she said. “When you get cells, you lose that connection.”
These days, this dynamic is also often reversed. A shared family phone meant that kids overheard some of their parents’ conversations, providing a window into their relationships, but today, children frequently see a parent silently staring at a screen, fingers tapping, occasionally furrowing a brow or chuckling. “Sometimes there are people that I've never even heard of that you're texting,” my 11-year old once told me. Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT and the author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, has described this as “the new silences of family life.”
Central to the smartphone’s pull is the fact that it is not just a phone. The original telephone was designed exclusively for the back-and-forth rhythm of speaking and listening, while today’s phones perform that function and so many others. “When it was just a phone, you could only have one conversation at a time,” says Mary Ellen Love, a teacher in New Jersey who raised two sons—22 and 24—during the landline era, and is now raising an 11-year-old daughter named Grace. “Now Grace can look at [her phone] and be involved in five conversations in a second.”
“Nobody had separation-anxiety issues when they walked out of the house without their [landline] phone,” says Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and a co-author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age. “Nobody used to say that their princess phone was their life. It's not your phone—it's the news, it's YouTube, it's your bank account, it's shopping … You can engage in every aspect of your life, and some of that is wonderful.”
Meanwhile, the physical medium of communication has shifted from telephone poles, visually linking individual homes, to the elusive air. The environment of each call has shifted from a living room or a kitchen to anywhere, and as a result, callers spend time placing each other: In the early days of the phone, they often asked, “Are you there?,” but now they have graduated to “Where are you?” When people look up after whiling away time in their virtual homes—their homepages, their home screens—they must adjust back to their physical surroundings. “You don't lose yourself in the same way when you're talking on the phone on the wall,” says Steiner-Adair. “You don't lose your sense of where you are in time and space.”
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Plenty of people don’t lament the passing of the family phone. Michael Muller, the 27-year-old son of Cheryl, the artist in Brooklyn, says he enjoys the constant proximity of a cellphone and prefers texting over calling, which he says people only use when they want to “extract an answer.” “Text is so much easier to take as much time as you want to think about it,” he told me. If he has kids, he’s not sure he’ll get a landline for his family to share.
Even in its infancy, the telephone wasn't always celebrated. Its rise prompted a London editor in the late 19th century to ask, “What will become of the privacy of life? What will become of the sanctity of the domestic hearth?” Some viewed the phone as supernatural (they struggled to understand how sound could travel through wire) or impractical (aboveground phone lines in the early days were often highly obtrusive). When people first shouted into phones, they felt awkward, as though they were performing.
Even as the family phone recedes into history a century and a half later, we can preserve the togetherness it promoted in other ways. Rosen, the psychology professor, says that “creating special family time is really critical,” and Turkle writes of the importance of device-free “sacred” spaces in the home. The family phone was hardly a necessary ingredient for family bonding.
And perhaps the spirit of the family phone can live on. Margaret Klein, an educational researcher living in New Jersey and a mother of three girls, ages 6, 9, and 11, has tried to ease into giving her daughters their own phones. Her girls share a stripped-down cellphone with no internet access, and call it “the family phone.” When her oldest went to a ballet program in Manhattan this summer, she brought it. Klein’s 9-year-old has used it a few times to text her camp friends. But “it always goes back and lives in its place at the end of the day,” she tells me—right next to their landline in the living room.
Indeed, even as smartphones have taken over, some people stand by their landlines. “I mainly want to keep it because it works when there is no power,” says Peter Eavis, a New York City–based journalist in his 50s and a father of two. “And as a veteran of 9/11, an actual NYC blackout, Hurricane Irene, and Superstorm Sandy, it gives me comfort.”
But Eavis’s landline is on its way to being an anomaly, and a generation of children who never had one are coming of age. Eventually, for those who enjoyed—or at least grew accustomed to—the sound of a communal phone ringing in their homes, a moment of silence will be in order.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/12/families-landline-shared-phone/603487/
The first sentence of the article; "My tween will never know the sound of me calling her name from another room after the phone rings.". Whose fault is that? It isn't my fault, it isn't your neighbors fault. It would be your fault. Landlines are still available. Landline phones are still being produced.
People like to complain about how technology is changing people and how kids are always on their phones and blah blah blah. In the end, if they wouldn't buy their 3 year old an I-phone or fall for all this "Got to have the newest and the best" then they would have to find something else to complain about.
People like to complain about how technology is changing people and how kids are always on their phones and blah blah blah. In the end, if they wouldn't buy their 3 year old an I-phone or fall for all this "Got to have the newest and the best" then they would have to find something else to complain about.
Seems they're in the terminal stage of decline here too.
It hit me this year with Christmas cards.
My mom passed away last year (relatively young) and so did several elderly aunts in their 80s and 90s. They were all the type of people who'd have spent hours on the phone chatting away about just life in general and would make a point of calling each other. They were very much the nexuses of communication in my extended family and now they've all passed away and in relatively quick succession.
I decided I would make an effort to try and keep the connections alive, and I've been doing some of it through social media, but I thought I would write some Christmas cards. Every year, when I go home there's always a huge display of cards on the mantle piece on little fake washing lines. So, I decided to dig out the old cards and get the reply addresses. Seems most of them are just "Merry Xmas from Ann and Patrick" "Happy New Year, Love Mary." I have no idea who 80% of them are from and none of them have reply addresses.
I ran though some of the cards with my dad and brother and they recognised some of them but only had vague notions of where some of these people might live. Then I thought, hey I'll look them up in the phone book (online) and it seems that going ex-directory (unlisted) is the new fashion due to the death of landlines, the advent of a plague of telemarketers and general modern paranoia, so it's now impossible to find anyone either to call them or write to them. Whereas if you went back 25+ (maybe a little further) years ago most households had a landline and it was relatively unusual to be ex-directory (unlisted.)
I didn't grow up in the age of "Number Please!?" or even the days of electromechanical switching. I was born in the 80s and the digital age was well established, but I do have fond memories of a phone in the hall, even if they were modern and cordless they were physically there and you could reach a household, not just an individual.
I even remember having a proper tape-based answering machine and then some crazy network-based "Family Mailbox" on the phone where when you'd call our house you'd get "You've reached the Simpsons household -- if you want to leave a message for Marge press 1, for Homer press 2, for Bart press 3 or for Lisa press 4 and each of us had our own private mail box. You picked up the phone and got the worbelling dial tone and you could check a message in you.
I think though it's an era that we're never going to see again. The technology's moved on so rapidly in the past couple of decades and really landline services are probably going to end up as something that will really only be used in offices or similar environments or for niche uses where someone particularly wants one (and obviously all VoIP based). The rest of us are just using mobiles.
Coincidentally, I was reading an article about the decline of landline usage here in Ireland and while it has been happening it seems to be increasing exponentially in the last few years. A lot of broadband services here tended to come with a VoIP landline (the router will almost always have an analogue RJ11 port for phone jacks and sometimes even can host DECT cordless phones like a little mini PBX) but I know in my case I probably could count on my hand the number of times a year I have used that service. I'm not even sure I could recall the number without looking it up in my iPhone.
My landline provider / ISP also offers an iPhone / Android app to use your landline, but I mean why would you bother? I installed it and it was a gimmick fo ra few days and then I forgot I even had it.
They all initially had some notion that consumers would still want landline services and that they'd all just hop over to VoIP when older digital circuit switched (TDM) services shut down, but in reality many of those companies have scaled back their investments in fixed voice services as there's very little demand.
it's also increasingly difficult to even find mobile plans that don't have unlimited voice minutes, even on really cheap 9.99/month plans they're usually throwing in voice as almost an afterthought freebie and then you've free pan-EU roaming and all of that stuff to, so it's really pointless having a landline.
They seem to be going the same way as payphones, hotel phones, fax machines and teletype. An era has very much ended.
It looks like we'll have a world where offices will be connected with SIP trunks and the majority of the rest of us aren't going to use anything other than our smartphones.. sigh.
It hit me this year with Christmas cards.
My mom passed away last year (relatively young) and so did several elderly aunts in their 80s and 90s. They were all the type of people who'd have spent hours on the phone chatting away about just life in general and would make a point of calling each other. They were very much the nexuses of communication in my extended family and now they've all passed away and in relatively quick succession.
I decided I would make an effort to try and keep the connections alive, and I've been doing some of it through social media, but I thought I would write some Christmas cards. Every year, when I go home there's always a huge display of cards on the mantle piece on little fake washing lines. So, I decided to dig out the old cards and get the reply addresses. Seems most of them are just "Merry Xmas from Ann and Patrick" "Happy New Year, Love Mary." I have no idea who 80% of them are from and none of them have reply addresses.
I ran though some of the cards with my dad and brother and they recognised some of them but only had vague notions of where some of these people might live. Then I thought, hey I'll look them up in the phone book (online) and it seems that going ex-directory (unlisted) is the new fashion due to the death of landlines, the advent of a plague of telemarketers and general modern paranoia, so it's now impossible to find anyone either to call them or write to them. Whereas if you went back 25+ (maybe a little further) years ago most households had a landline and it was relatively unusual to be ex-directory (unlisted.)
I didn't grow up in the age of "Number Please!?" or even the days of electromechanical switching. I was born in the 80s and the digital age was well established, but I do have fond memories of a phone in the hall, even if they were modern and cordless they were physically there and you could reach a household, not just an individual.
I even remember having a proper tape-based answering machine and then some crazy network-based "Family Mailbox" on the phone where when you'd call our house you'd get "You've reached the Simpsons household -- if you want to leave a message for Marge press 1, for Homer press 2, for Bart press 3 or for Lisa press 4 and each of us had our own private mail box. You picked up the phone and got the worbelling dial tone and you could check a message in you.
I think though it's an era that we're never going to see again. The technology's moved on so rapidly in the past couple of decades and really landline services are probably going to end up as something that will really only be used in offices or similar environments or for niche uses where someone particularly wants one (and obviously all VoIP based). The rest of us are just using mobiles.
Coincidentally, I was reading an article about the decline of landline usage here in Ireland and while it has been happening it seems to be increasing exponentially in the last few years. A lot of broadband services here tended to come with a VoIP landline (the router will almost always have an analogue RJ11 port for phone jacks and sometimes even can host DECT cordless phones like a little mini PBX) but I know in my case I probably could count on my hand the number of times a year I have used that service. I'm not even sure I could recall the number without looking it up in my iPhone.
My landline provider / ISP also offers an iPhone / Android app to use your landline, but I mean why would you bother? I installed it and it was a gimmick fo ra few days and then I forgot I even had it.
They all initially had some notion that consumers would still want landline services and that they'd all just hop over to VoIP when older digital circuit switched (TDM) services shut down, but in reality many of those companies have scaled back their investments in fixed voice services as there's very little demand.
it's also increasingly difficult to even find mobile plans that don't have unlimited voice minutes, even on really cheap 9.99/month plans they're usually throwing in voice as almost an afterthought freebie and then you've free pan-EU roaming and all of that stuff to, so it's really pointless having a landline.
They seem to be going the same way as payphones, hotel phones, fax machines and teletype. An era has very much ended.
It looks like we'll have a world where offices will be connected with SIP trunks and the majority of the rest of us aren't going to use anything other than our smartphones.. sigh.
