I'm really curious to know the percentage of people who read this actually remember ever using a dial phone. God, I feel old.

I used a dial phone at my grandmother's and I'm a spry young thing, Jake.

Yeah but Tenn, that was back when you were just a little kid, like 13 years old. At least you can carry the concept to the next generation (not that anyone will believe you). :D

God, I feel old.

Contrary to popular belief, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the regular commenters are north of fifty.

This rotary deal is quite appealing, however I find that the classic banana phone suits me just fine.

We should have a poll on ages. We could plot it. JRabbit has already supplanted me from my throne, damn kid is a freshman. But I've never seen him in the threads here, only on IRC, so I may remain the little tyke.

My parents had a wall mounted dial phone well into the 1990s. Maybe right up until they moved out of my childhood home in 1999. Touch Tone service cost a few bucks extra a month, and they didn't see the point.

I brought home a couple of phones with switches for tone and pulse dialing. If my parents needed to do something that required a tone, they punched in the number with the phone on pulse, then switched over to tone so they could navigate through menus.

Oh! And while I was living there my modem had to dial pulse. It made a wonderful archaic ratchety sound.

I actually had a table-model Bell Telephone phone with a dial. It was missing one of the round feet, so it didn't sit quite right. As I recall, I donated it to Goodwill while I was living in California.

FYIage:

When I was a kid (late 60s), there were maybe a half a dozen models of phone available. Wall unit with dial (we had one of those), table unit with dial, equivalents with punch buttons, in either black or tan. And then there was the Princess phone, which was translucent and glowed pink.

There might have been units with decorator colors.

Back then the wires were phone company property. You were charged to have installed, and maybe even to just have, extra outlets for the same phone line. My brother and I made unauthorized extensions in the basement and a bedroom.

Jake, I'm only 32 and we had a rotary dial phone until I was in my early teens.

I have not tried this yet... Does it have the old pulse-beeps as well (rather than the DTMF tones)?

Our phone was on the kitchen wall. The cord was about a micron long so that you couldn't sit down while talking. I guess that enforced etiquette on the party line that we shared with the Bunkers and the Barlows.

still have one below decks somewhere,really should try it to see if pulse dialing still works

Ah, you kind, young people make an old geezer feel young agin. Now, get off my lawn!

Great! Thats brilliant! I miss that feel of the plastic pushing at my fingertip until i hit the cold metal stop.

Now all I have to do is start memorising peoples 10 digit mobile phone numbers and I'm good to go!

My grandathers number till 15 years ago was 3 digits. The place on the phone for the rotary dial was blanked out. We picked it up, and told the exchange the 3 digit phone number we wanted to get in touch with, or booked a trunk call to our relatives in other cities. All the numbers were written in this lovely little modern phone book full of tabbed cards that closed with a spring catch. You slid the spring catch to the right letter, and the phone book would only unlock to that page.

We had one in my house when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s.

We had a classy old bakelite rotodialler that we used up until i was probably 10, but it was put out to pasture on a bookshelf for quite a long time, hence why I remember it. My grandparents still have one of the more modern models with the plastic body.

I also remember having to research them for a high school engineering class, and had to demonstrate how it worked on one that i took apart. The best bit of info was that the pulses are generated simply by switching the line "on" and "off". While the roto dialling mechanism automates this, you can do it by tapping the button under the handset really quickly, which I tried without avail as soon as i discovered it. You can read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing

So what I'm wondering is if it is possible to pulse dial on a cordless phone by pressing the talk and end buttons really quickly? :)

could we get a morse key to do the SMS?

i've just installed it and it's a wonderful feeling!

Few comments:

- the program works by recognizing as dialled the digit that you are dragging clockwise, not the one that is aligned to the metal stopper by the time you release it, i.e. the digit is chosen at the point of touching. However you still have to drag it all the way to the stopper for it to be chosen.

- there is no satisfying sound of clicking during the clockwise rotation, but there is one when you release it during the counterclockwise return of the wheel. However, it's the same amount of sound and rotation for each digit, i.e. it's the same sound for '1' and for '0'.

- i would add quasi-haptics in form of battery vibration if you drag over the metal stopper, indicating impossible action.

- The same repository seems to have loads of nice software for the iphone, but unfortunately for me all of it is in French and none in Macedonian.

We had a rotary phone at the cottage until last year. We now use our cells instead.

I'm looking forward to seeing the Steampunk iphone interface with Roman numerals.

I want an animation of Lily Tomlin going, "One ringy-dingy... two ringy-dingy..."

This year I got a 1940’s era black Ericsson desktop rotary phone for Christmas (+10 to my wife’s rating btw) and I wanted it for two reasons…

One, my cell and cordless phones give feedback on my computer speakers, and on each other. If my cell rang while my wife on the cordless home phone I couldn’t pick it up. Changing the channels didn’t do much on the cordless either. This phone gives me no interference.

Second, (the secret real reason I wanted it) was to be able to cradle the phone between my shoulder and ear. I find cells so small that I can’t do this, and after a 3 minute call my arm starts to ache in the inner elbow holding it to my head. For short calls I’m not going to run around looking for my (very poor sounding) headset… so voila! To think we already had a technological answer to my problem. It sits right beside my computer, which allows me to talk and surf/post on BB simultaneously.

BTW, I only use it to answer calls, and not make them, as I don’t have pulse on my line… but heck, it’s not as if I could remember any numbers without my cell’s phonebook anyway.

And then there was the Princess phone

Not only did we have the Princess phone, but we had the early model which required an external ringer as well! You could set it for a soft br-r-r-r-r-ing, a loud BR-R-R-R-R-ING, or a ding-dong sound.

One night, the babysitter went crazy, thinking that the ding-dong sound was the doorbell, when it was actually the phone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_telephone

I saw it mant times but never used it. Really want to try.

Haha, you gotta love the retro. Is this where we're headed? A full circle where the highest of hi-tech begins to overlap with the lowest of low-tech? Nano-Stone-Age-Tools and Quantum-Wheels?

When I was a kid in the "My room is like private OK?" phase, I built a door lock out of a phone dial, relays, solenoids and a vacuum tube as a timer. So I announced to my older brother "My bedroom is now impregnable without the three digit code!". He walks up to the door and dials 1 repeatedly. The door opens.

Moral: Nothing is impregnable, and always dare a 16 year old to break your security systems.

I used to be one of those people that had every phone number I've ever needed memorized, up until the point that I could back my cellphone book up over my service provider's storage AND my own computer. It's so redundant now, I couldn't lose a phone number if I tried, so my years of diligent memorization went out the window.

So does anyone actually remember enough phone numbers to make this useful? Does it do auto-rotary dial if you choose someone from your contacts list? Or is it only useful for dialing 911 real slow like?

Pulse-dial-modeming YAY!

du-du-du-du-du
du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du
du-du-du-du-du-du-du

Did you know you could use the hang-up rocker to dial a number a pulse phone? You have to click in at the exact same speed as the pulses, and just clik-clik-clik (lightly) the same amount of times as each number, with a gap between each..

Simple pleasures :)

Enochrewt:

What about numbers that you don't know. Ever use a phonebook? Ever get a number from an advertisment?

This would certainly take care of the "accidentally calling someone whilst the phone is in your pocket" problem.

Arkizzle: Yes, very very occasionally, but Mostly I'm looking up a number I don't know on the web ON my phone and I click "Dial this number".

It's a quaint idea, and I'd probably put it on my phone because I manually dial the phone so little.

I hate to spoil the fun but what do you do if you need to press # or * ?

Add these two holes and genuine rachety, clikety sounds please, 'cause my french is not quite good enough to figure out where the "code source" is.

My phone number used to be Buckingham 18329.

And when I lived in rural Scotland in the mid-80s, we had a TWO DIGIT phone number! (Local exchange, obviously.)

I miss the sound of the clicks, and I miss the hard feel of the ring against your finger as you forced it up and over to the metal stop.

As a kinesthetic person, I will never forget what that feels like.

God, this is bringing back memories.