Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for November 20, 2012

LOL! Imagine if Phoebe had found a rotary dial phone!

I’m looking forward to the thing that makes the iPhone look like that.

I remember me and Josh using a rotary phone when were children. Boy, did our fingers get sore from dailing all our friends!

I’m still using one just like that. At least it isn’t beaming radiation through my brain. The sound is always great and I never get dropped calls. Newer is not better. I will never surrender my copper conductors!

I wonder what she would make of my wonderful manual typewriter and my marvelous stereo turntable.

I remember when those first came out – Ma Bell touted them as the Slimline Princess phone. It had press buttons on the handset that lit up! Quite a change from the rotary phone. Of course, it suffered from the same problem as most cell phones do today – completely useless when some automated response computer asks you to enter a number because you can’t listen and poke the buttons at the same time…

Hey, I still keep one handy. If the power goes out and my cordless goes dead, I can plug in one of those babies and keep my landline going.

At our older apartament we had that 1960’s rotary that worked perfectly as of 2007. I kinda miss it. I mean, our older flat altogether. But it’s just like with that phone – you have to abandon things so not to become a museum object yourself

I can still remember the day back in ’78 when I saw the original hand-held cell phone. It was a prototype and I was told to handle it carefully as it was one of only a handful in existence and cost something like fifty grand. The thing looked like a 3/4 scale military walkie-talkie, and the big thing I remember was how I marveled at how small it was…

Maybe it is a rotary phone. I remember seeing some “Slimline” types like that that had rotary dials in them. I think they were for places that didn’t have touch tone service.

“Aw gimme a BREAK, mom. Next you’ll be telling me that big, fat thing, with the tiny screen is a Television Set!”

this is a really nicely drawn comic

Dials and touch tone generators are addons to a standard that is compatible with the wall mount crank phones and candlestick two piece phones.

In the 1970s, there was a time when AT&T was selling old-style telephones; models that had the ear-piece and the cup-like transmitter, but had a rotary dial… also victorian-style phones, etc., and they called them “fancy ring-a-dings.” It is a little unfortunate that the newer high-tech stuff doesn’t have that kind of style.

Now tell her about party lines.

Hee, hee. I used to record voice lessons for my singing students on tape. One day, about eleven years ago, I handed a little girl the recording of her voice lesson. She looked at it for a while and then asked what it was and how she was suppose to use it. I expalined it to her, her mom and they looked at each other. Turns out the moms parents never allowed tapes and she never used tapes in her car even after she got out of her parents house. The car she was driving did not have a tape player and she and her husband only used CDs. That is when I stopped recording voice lessons.

Yes, Phoebe, phones once had WIRES!

Is it just me, or does Phoebe’s mom look a lot like Dana’s avatar?

And this is how people’s computers talked to other people’s computers… One computer at a time…

Yes that’s a phone Pheebs. And I can show you a tape player, a record player a TV with knobs, a rotary dial, a crank phone, a beeper, a fax machine, a film camera, a flash bulb, a lazier disk, a VCR, an Atari, an Apple II, a type writer, VHS Video camera, the original version of any re-make,and an episode of Boy Meets World. (wounder what Marigold’s fav 90s or earlier Equestrian based TV series is)

We have 4 landlines (Mom won’t part w them) 2 cordless; & hubby, Mom & I each have our own cells!

1st thing we did was play songs with the touchtones. Can still sing several ancient phone numbers.

PHE household is in real trouble in emergency if they are totally reliant on wireless and battery. 1st thing to go out is the cell towers – too much traffic. The second thing is the power. Snowbelt people have their own generators but even that needs non renew fuel.

Ham shacks have hand cranks and a 3 hour waiting line to get a communication out.

my grandma’s house still has a rotary phone!!! It’s pretty cool and works fine…

: Dremember this?

i remember when you wanted to talk to someone you tied a note to the foot of a pigeon and hoped it didnt get eaten by a hawk

I remember seeing one of the old DynaTec’s. It weighed about 2 and a half pounds and lasted about an hour before you had to charge it for 8.…And, of course, now you can have a Twilight ring tone. ugh.…Anybody remember Princess phones?

OOOHHHHH a cord phone.

Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense to hold on to old-fashioned phones just for power failures—phone companies are abandoning copper wire, anyway. In fact, I just got a letter yesterday asking me to set up an appointment so they can rewire us.

You want other scary things?

When I started programming computers, all the computers in the world put together were about equal to one iPhone, and IBM’s most popular mainframe maxed out at 16,000 characters of memory. (You could get it with at as little as 1,400. Anyway, if you needed more than 4,000, you had to get an extra chassis.) There were several disk drives available for it, but the most popular held 2,000,000 characters (you could get up to five of them).

When I was young, we didn’t have a tape recorder, but we did have a disk recorder. It used to spin a tangle of fine black plastic thread as it etched the groove into the disk.

In 1955, we got a brand-new telephone that was in three pieces. There was the usual handset, plus the desktop part with the dial and the hook on it, but there was also a biggish box that mounted on the wall, containing the bell and about half the circuitry.

Before we had that, we had a two-digit phone number. One digit chose which line to use; the second was how many times it rang when the call was for you. Everyone in the neighborhood had to share the one line, and you were only supposed to pick up the phone if it made your special ring, but there was nothing to stop you from listening in on other people’s calls. To make a call, you had to pick up the phone while no one else was on the line and talk to the human operator (a mile or two down the road), who would either make the ring for the other person, if you wanted to talk to someone on the same line, or would physically connect your line to another line by plugging it into a socket.

the first phone I remember using, was big and black and had a dial … and we were on a party line … I had to ask two ladies to get off the phone and let me call my school to let them know we wouldnt be in … trouble was nobody was there to take the call … we had had a blizzard (Texas Panhandle) and couldnt even get out of the door to attempt the walk across town to school …

The old phones also had some heft to them- you could just about use them as weapons if need be.A few winters back we had a bad storm and my power was out for about two weeks- longer for others in the area- and without the traditional land-line I would have had no phone service at all. They haven’t said anything about re-wiring in this area so you bet we hang on to our old phones! Everybody I know has one in the garage or a closet for that reason.

We didn’t get a push-button phone until 1980 (digi-pulse, not Touch Tone), and didn’t get a private line until I needed one for Internet access in 1996. (You see, Phoebe, in the Olden Days you had to use your phone line to connect to the Internet, via a box that made a funny noise while it was connecting…)

I love the “Mom’s honor”. It says a lot about the relationship Mom has with her daughter, and about Mom herself.