Phone Thread

[daveamkrayoguy]

RADIO SHACK, circa 1995:

The clock lights up w/ a neon tube in pink & blue, and it flashes when the phone rings, but unfortunately the neon is BURNT OUT!!!!!!

-- Dave

 

[rp2813]

Wow, that card dialer phone is a very early touch-tone.  Only ten buttons on the touchpad.  Even regular model 2500 touch-tone phones with only ten buttons are hard to find.  Those card dialers must be rare indeed.

 

[tomturbomatic]

I had a friend in Atlanta who was about phones like we are about appliances. He had phones coming out the ass and the only room with just one phone was the bathroom. He had a couple of the old rotary automatic dialers that were way to slow to use when tone dialing came out. Because this was before you could own your own telephone, he disconnected all of the ringers on his phones and used the chime sets because the phone company could tell the number of phones you had by the current used for the ringers. If you had more phones than you were paying for, you were in deep trouble. He gave me one and I have it in my house and keep all of the ringers off. He also had those little tilt-tab speaker phones. I have one of those packed in a box somewhere.

 

[appliguy]

Ralph

<span style="font-family: arial black,avant garde;">The 10 button touch tone phones are NOT 2500's they are 1500's and they were made from mid 1963 through about 1968. I have been told by a phone guy that the reason they added the pound key (which was called the Octothorpe by Bell Telephone) and star key was because of the addition of Picture Phone Service, yes picture phone service was offered in big cities starting around 1968 but it proved unpopular. I remember seeing an ad for out of a Washington Post Newspaper from the time and you could go to a place where they had picture phone service set up and make a picture phone call.....PAT COFFEY</span>

 

[appliguy]

Ralph

<span style="font-family: georgia,palatino; font-size: small;">The 10 button touch tone phones are NOT 2500's they are 1500's and they were made from mid 1963 through about 1968. I have been told by a phone guy that the reason they added the pound key (which was called the Octothorpe by Bell Telephone) and star key was because of the addition of Picture Phone Service, yes picture phone service was offered in big cities starting around 1968 but it proved unpopular. I remember seeing an ad for out of a Washington Post Newspaper from the time and you could go to a place where they had picture phone service set up and make a picture phone call.....PAT COFFEY</span>

 

[whirlcool]

Hmm.. nowadays we have Skype for picture phone service, and it's cheap too!

The only place I ever saw a card dialer telephone in use was in an office somewhere in Chicago. It was on the receptionists desk. I watched her while waiting and she would put those cards in and when the card popped back up she would take it out and start talking.

Anyone remember the ring back code? I know that if you dialed in 571 then after about 10 seconds dial 6 and hang up the phone would ring back to you. This was handy for setting the volume on your phone ringers.

 

[rp2813]

Pat, yes, thanks for the correction.  The ten-button touch-tones are 1500's. 

 

As far as I know, the "#" key is still referred to as the "octothorpe" by the former Bell System telcos.

 

I'll try to get a picture of a couple of my more modern phone sets posted here soon.

 

[MrX]

That's an engineering test code.

Here in Ireland, when I was a kid, if you dialed 17 and hung up, the phone would ring after a few minutes and there would be all sorts of strange clicks followed by :

"Welcome to the automatic line test facility - Testing... testing... testing... Complete!!! - Line number : (your phone number read out) - metallic path: OK. Ring back: OK - Polarity: Normal - Loop: OK.

To continue, authenticate and terminate with a #.

If you picked up and tone dialed 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,*,0,# the switch would say "Your keypad is functioning correctly - Test complete, please hang up"

Or, if you pulse dialed 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 - "Your dial is functioning correctly, please hang up"

Now if you dial 199000 it just says your phone number.
19800 will tell you which carrier your calls are with for each call category.

The engineering test codes are much better hidden

 

[rp2813]

On the old crossbar switch, we'd dial 960, wait for a click, then dial 6 and hang up.   The phone would start ringing, and when the handset was lifted, we'd get dial tone.

 

Once when I was at work (at The Phone Company) a technician was installing a phone at a desk nearby and I saw him dial a seven-digit number to make the phone ring back.  I wrote the number down, but it only worked for lines out of that particular switching office, and I lived in Verizon territory at the time anyway.  I had been told that Verizon customers simply had to dial their own number to get their phone to ring back, and that method did indeed work.

 

[MrX]

A very old and worn Northern Telecom (Ireland) 500-type telephone made for P&T, the old Irish telco back in the 1960s.

Link to the Co. Clare Museum.

Loading…

www.clarelibrary.ie

 

[MrX]

1980s

This was the phone that sat in our living room when I was a kid, dates from about 1985.

 

[MrX]

Irish phone jack

Here's the standard Irish phone jack, it's just a 6-terminal RJ11 / RJ12 with a shutter to keep the dust / your fingers out. It contains some circuitry to allow a line test to be performed without the phone plugged in too.

Standard from the late 1970s onwards. Nowadays they come with DSL filters built in etc etc.

 

[MrX]

Old phone jacks

This is the type of phone jack we used to use, it was also used in the UK in some installations. It's very unlikely you'll encounter one of these anywhere anymore though. But, you still find the odd relic on someone's skirting (baseboards).

Ireland adopted RJ11 plugs, while the UK developed it's own which is basically just a modified bigger version of an RJ11 plug.

The old phones had plugs which were very like what you'd find on the end of an electric guitar.

 

[MrX]

Modern British plug vs RJ11

Here's a current British (BT) plug vs RJ11.

(We use RJ11 in Ireland, same as the US/Canada and RJ11 is used on most telephone devices here i.e. the socket on the back/bottom of phones/faxes/modems etc is almost always RJ11 with the local national standard on the other end)

As you can see, the UK BT plug is definitely RJ-11 'inspired'

 

[aquarius8000]

Ethernet cables

CAT 5 is the cable we just put up. Here is the wiring diogram...

 

[appliguy]

here is another one of my favorite phones

It is a Stromberg Carlson Model 1212 "Fat Boy" telephone with an all bakelite body. These phones were made only from circa 1936 to circa 1940 due to a frailty in the design....if you knocked the phone off the table and it hit the floor cradle first..the cradle ears were prone to breaking off. This phone was made as a dial and non dial telephone. I once saw an add in a 1969 Better Homes and Garden magazine that showed these phones painted in different colors and being sold as extension phones for if memory serves $12. I believe my phone was one of those phones because when I got as a birthday gift it was covered in peeling turqouise paint but my phone guy restored it for me....PAT COFFEY

 

[appliguy]

and yet another one

This one is a Kellogg Red Bar phone.  PAT COFFEY

 

[appliguy]

and this picture shows why it is called the Red Bar Phone

I love the look of this phone....PAT COFFEY

 

[MrX]

Ireland Phone

This was the ultimate in tacky handsets sold by Telecom Eireann (now Eircom), the "Ma Bell" of Ireland in its day.

It's a fully functional, wall-mountable, Northern Telecom (Ireland) manufactured phone.
Supports tone dialing only and dates form the mid 1980s.

 

[MrX]

Cringe-worthy 1980s BT (British Telecom) advert for "SlimTel", a bog-standard wall mounted slimline telephone.