41–50 of 56 posts
I'm usually good at avoiding visual distractions but I gave up trying to read this.
yeah sorry about that, I've removed the cool walking background sprite. I'm going for a 90's theme, where eveyrthing looked awful but felt really personal
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In the 90s there was a charge on my mom's phone bill for touch tone dialing. I called up to dispute the charges but the phone company wouldn't have any of it so I had them remove the "service" and they warned me that she wouldn't be able to dial out any more. I flipped a switch on her phone to simulate pulse dialing and a few months later switched it back. She was never charged again.
That pulse switch always felt so strange to me. It was the Rosetta of POTS.
it wasn't the famous "sports illustrated" sneaker phone which some versions had the pulse/tone switch (see photos of 2 different sole keypads) .
https://oldphoneworks.com/products/the-sports-illustrated-te...
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Heard a similar story about why the german emergency number is 110 and not the easier to memorize/type 111: The latter is 3 clicks on the line with generous spacing requirements, the former 12 clicks. So 111 would be much more prone to misdialing than 110. (I guess the international number 112 is a compromise. Still a low number of clicks, but I suppose the timing would be more difficult to get right?)
Greetings from Sweden. Before switching to European standard 112 in 1996, the emergency number was… 90 000. Three reasons for that: 1) Unlike most other countries, the Swedish dials had the number nine, and not zero, at the end. So "90 000" was considered easy to remember and easy to hit, even in the dark. 2) "90 000" was relatively easy to call by hand using the switch hook, on a telephone without a functioning numb…
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That pulse switch always felt so strange to me. It was the Rosetta of POTS.
I remember growing up our family got an extra phone we could use in the basement (I think it came with a magazine subscription oddly) . It had the keypad, but would just generate the pulses like a rotary phone. Very slow and felt wrong. I’m pretty sure this phone didn’t have the switch to go into “tone” dialing mode like our other phones which were only tone. it wasn't the famous "sports illustrated" sneaker phone wh…
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/the-funk...
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Why would a phone with the dial intentionally disabled be connected to anything?
My father said his parents had installed some kind of lock on the dial to prevent the use
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I've shared this story before, but you may find it amusing: Back in 1996, I was living in Almaden Valley (South San Jose) and we had underground utilities. We also lived on top of an underground stream. After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy! I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud kno…
I support a PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point, aka "911 center"). We see one of these every couple of months. It used to be less frequent. The incumbent wireline carrier here is letting the cable plant rot and it's happening more often.
We found all kinds of tricks to protect our fingers. Today I would try to build a manual dialer based of an ESP32 or something :)
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Greetings from Sweden. Before switching to European standard 112 in 1996, the emergency number was… 90 000. Three reasons for that: 1) Unlike most other countries, the Swedish dials had the number nine, and not zero, at the end. So "90 000" was considered easy to remember and easy to hit, even in the dark. 2) "90 000" was relatively easy to call by hand using the switch hook, on a telephone without a functioning numb…
If 1 click was for 0, how many clicks for 1?
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I support a PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point, aka "911 center"). We see one of these every couple of months. It used to be less frequent. The incumbent wireline carrier here is letting the cable plant rot and it's happening more often.
Seems like that telco should get fined for misuse of 911...
