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  1. My parents actually still have one and I was lucky enough to witness the absolute profoundly puzzled look on a 16 year olds face when they stopped dead in their tracks and asked: “what is that”?
    It was like she had seen an alien.

    I explained it and she just shook her head like we were all stupid for not just using a smart phone!

    sigh…..

    • Haha! I love that the boy in the article says “I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born”. I’m pretty sure most Walkman users of the 1980’s would have said the same thing.

      And I bought a bright red 1970’s dial phone for our landline because I was fed up of the cordless phones going astray and most of all, breaking so often. A retired phone engineer converted it for me (with a bemused look on his face the whole time) and I love it. The children still rush to answer it (hurrah!) and I’ve caught them explaining how it works to their friends. The fact it’s ‘on’ as soon as you pick up the receiver is what gets them.

    • Yeah, it was all those broken cordless phones that prompted me to go back to the WE 500. And I would love to hear your kids explaining the phone!

  2. “Cord to central office…” There is a whole history and social studies class in that phrase.

    I miss my old phone, one just like that. The ring would wake the dead, it was attached to the wall so it never got lost, it was a whopping $8 a month, and it always worked, even when the power went out.

  3. Several years ago, a neighbor who obviously didn’t know us as well as she thought she did, sent a text message to our only phone, a land line. I’m not sure how it happened, but our phone rang repeatedly all day and when we answered there was a garbled, computerized, barely-understandable message. After the fourth time, I managed to figure out the phone number of the sender and I called her . . . she was all bent out of shape that we didn’t have a phone that she could text to.

    • I’ve got those too. A computer reads the message, sort of. I’ve never understood it either.

  4. I am much more interested in the telephone diagram than any sports on tv. There is a business in town owned by prominent, wealthy, and influential people. They still use this type phone, inherited from parents who originally owned the store.

    All their “books” are still in books, huge ledgers. One employee knows how to input all this into a program on the computer. These people and their employees are my age or younger.

  5. My husband worked for the phone company,so we have a few phones like that(non-working)
    The one we use is a wall phone with a long cord, you know, so I can talk on the phone and walk around.I think it’s around 35 years old.We did update to caller ID about 20 years ago.
    No cell phones in this house.

  6. No cell phones in this house either. All land lines. I still have a rotary wall phone that frustrates the kids and another business phone that has a speaker on it so I can put the receiver down and do other stuff in the office while I am on hold. And years ago at the 99 cent store I got a small caller ID. Pretty cool I think. Oh and the business phone has a 50 foot cord so I can walk around and talk. Works for me.

  7. When cleaning out my grandmother’s house, we discovered 3 rotary phones from the ’50s — all of them work. I gave away the black ones and kept the red one. I get so many comments on it, and I love that there’s no battery, it works during a power outage, and my daughter (who is 4) gets a history lesson when she uses it. It takes an age to dial a phone number with area code, though. We do have cell phones and a cordless landline phone, so for us it’s more ‘merging the past with present’.

  8. Hey Erik, did you ever hear the phrase/term “the electric can-opener question”? The gist is that just because a technology is new, it isn’t necessarily better. My personal addition to this would be: Has the technology improved society? We now live in a world where you are far more likely to be killed by a motorist using a phone than a drunk driver.

  9. We have one of those in a lovely green (and a slightly newer yellow push button one for when we have to deal with robots). I dread the day AT&T kills rotary service to our land line in the name of upgrades…

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