ON THIS DATE IN
HISTORY, THE FIRST PUSH-BUTTON (TOUCH-TONE) TELEPHONES DEBUTED IN THE UNITED
STATES, EVENTUALLY REPLACING MOST ROTARY-DIAL MODELS
Well, then. Rotary dials are now “historical.” That’s hysterical.
Turns out that of all the “retro” thingies, teens and
twenty-somethings do not know how to use a rotary dial. They stare at it, try
to press here and there, and when nothing happens, they declare the gizmo to be
broken.
That’s okay. I don’t drive a stick-shift vehicle, either. But
I know the basics of how it works and if my life depended on it, I think (I
hope) I could manage somehow. I also think that if I was caught in a
time-travel tunnel<, I could manage to make a call with the early phones
where you cranked the one lever, and an operator listened to your instructions
and connected you.
My point of amazement is that having no notion of how to use
a rotary dial means young’uns aren’t ever watching older movies. There are
plenty of scenes in movies from pre-1963 where dialing a number is visible.
Hitchcock alone used these for tension building.
Grumpiness spiel done, I am glad for the push-button dialers
and today’s the day to celebrate this milestone.
7 comments:
What a shame! Clearly families should watch the classics together. Same with books.
You didn't talk about party lines. I remember those. :)
Oh, yes. We had that back when most Israelis had yet to have phones at all. Lines were slowly installed in the early sixties. The family we shared our line with had a teen age daughter. This meant we had very limited use of our phone as the teenager monopolized the line... Even when we got to have our own line, the phones were family phones. Today's teens would bristle at the thought of not having "their own"---
My great grandma had a dial phone. I loved listening to the noise it made when you put your finger in the hole to dial a number :P
I remember those dial phones, although they were going out by the time I was a teen. We do love the old movies at our house! My older son and I watched a few Hitchcocks this fall, and I'm looking forward to watching a few classic holiday ones next month.
I don't miss rotary phones. Or pay phones. There were lots of pay phones in classic movies.
I don't miss the rotary dial phones either. That's why I celebrate the date the touchtone was invented. But I do wish young folks would watch older movies or be curious about how it was back when. I have watched movies and plays depicting life as it was a hundred years before I ever was🤓
Post a Comment