Who wants in? We can talk about what is was like to write a letter to your grandma or having no other way to ask someone out other than by calling them on the phone. Or checking out movies at Blockbuster or whatever your national equivalent was (we usually checked out videos at the grocery store, actually).
We’re cool because we can actually remember the USSR and “East” Germany. Although not as cool, I can remember when homophobia and transphobia was so much more widely accepted and the “default” position for most Americans. Not as cool.
I remember rotary phones.
My folks have their old rotary phone in the basement. Showed it to my kids and they didn’t believe it was actually a phone.
I've found that at least the models from the late 70s also still work perfectly fine, they use the same plugs as modern phones in my country. Audio quality on them is excellent, too.
Well now I want to try this out.
the western electric 500 and 554 were so ubiquitous that even a mint condition one will sell for around $50 on ebay. they're built so well that it'll probably keep working for another 50-100 years with occasional maintenance
if only landlines were cheap.
What did they do, start swiping on it like in those awful comics, or just confused about how it could possibly work?
Well my kids are very little, they were just confused more than anything.
My parents used a rotary phone up until a couple years ago when it broke and it was more expensive to buy a rotary than a digital. They hated there was an up charge on phone bills in their area for "touchtone" dialing rather than rotary and so stuck with it until the wheels came off.
I was barely too young to be around for party lines even. My grandma and my FIL both had them until a few years before I was born