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Todays Hi-Tech Video
Jun. 11th, 2011 11:57 amWhen I was a wee child, we still had a phone without a dial. When you picked up the receiver, a pleasant woman asked, "Number, please." Then, we got a phone with a funny wheel on the front: a dial! We were intrigued by it, and perhaps a bit unsure of how it worked. The video embedded here was the Bell System's way of informing people how to use those newfangled dial phones. The one we got in our house was identical to the one shown in the video. The Bell System owned the phone and you leased it from them. That way, the phone company could ensure that no substandard equipment was connected to its lines, and the consumer was assured that if something went wrong, one of Ma Bell's many children would drop by the house and swap it out for a functional phone.
For some reason the video stopped being embedded...I can't tell why. So here's the link to the page on which I found it.
Today, dial phones are almost a thing of the past. I have not seen one in use for around 20 years. When the Touch-Tone phone first came out, you had to pay extra to use it. Now everyone owns their own phone, called the landline nowadays. They all have buttons, or in the case of many mobile phones like my iPhone, virtual buttons. We have thus come full circle: most people under the age of 30 or so have never used, or even seen, a dial phone in the Bakelite…um…flesh. And "Number, please"? I am probably one of the youngest people ever to have had a non-dial, non-button phone.
Nowadays, some phones will dial a number for you if you simply speak it into the mouthpiece. In the 1950's, I could do the same. As the Scriptures say, there is nothing new under the sun.
For some reason the video stopped being embedded...I can't tell why. So here's the link to the page on which I found it.
Today, dial phones are almost a thing of the past. I have not seen one in use for around 20 years. When the Touch-Tone phone first came out, you had to pay extra to use it. Now everyone owns their own phone, called the landline nowadays. They all have buttons, or in the case of many mobile phones like my iPhone, virtual buttons. We have thus come full circle: most people under the age of 30 or so have never used, or even seen, a dial phone in the Bakelite…um…flesh. And "Number, please"? I am probably one of the youngest people ever to have had a non-dial, non-button phone.
Nowadays, some phones will dial a number for you if you simply speak it into the mouthpiece. In the 1950's, I could do the same. As the Scriptures say, there is nothing new under the sun.
