Re: Wanna hear a sweet sound? ... especially for us old farts.

dark side of the moo® · 2023-07-23T13:08:14.371Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLefVM-Rvw Bell System by Western Electric, Model 500, Rotary dial phone, manufactured from 1949 through the 1980s. My mom's phone, part of the soundtrack of my life (I was born in 1957). I cannot remember a time when that ring didn't blast through her house... it would wake the dead. When she died at age 86 in 2003, it was still hooked up in the den via the original 4-prong plug. When I decided to see if I could get it working again a few years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find an adapter that converts from 4-prong to standard phone clip. And the clarity and volume of the receiver is amazing, you forget just how clear a "real phone" used to sound. And the rotary dial worked perfectly when I still had a LAN line. It's heavy, no wonder it still works after 70 years of abuse. They really made stuff to last back then...

probably appreciate technology more than the youngsters. Was cool that when the power was out, the phone worked when nothing else did, though a cell works in a power outage if you had charged it. Those old copper wires to landline phones did make for a great sound.

Landlines are being phased out in favor of calls over an internet connection, which of course is useless when the internet is out or you're really old school and don't have home internet. And routers don't work in power outages unless you have a backup power source.

https://cordcuttersnews.com/att-is-saying-goodbye-to-landline-phones-as-it-pushes-customers-to-voip-options/#:~:text=Back%20in%20August%20of%202022,now%20being%20replaced%20by%20fiber

AT&T is Saying Goodbye to Landline Phones As It Pushes Customers to VOIP Options | Cord Cutters News

If you are like me, you may have never paid for a home phone. In the 20 some years since I bought my first house, I have never paid for a home phone. Now in many markets, if you want an old-fashioned landline phone, you are out of luck. Instead, AT&T and others are pushing […]

djones73

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Jul 24, 2023, 6:52 AM

Each LAND line required a pair of wires from the Central Office where the switching system was located. Eventually they developed multiplexing systems that combined 24 channels on 1 pair of wires that then split to 24 pairs to the individual houses. Now a single fiber optic strand carries thousands of channels and a fiber cable has multiple fiber strands. The cost of copper wire was a major investment and up keep to the phone companies and has limited capacity even with the multiplexing, whereas fiber provides much more band width for calls, internet data and video. Land lines still require a pair of wires to each house along with a fiber connection(or cable TV coaxial cable connection, eventually will be al fiber) for internet data and video. The Voice over IP (Internet Protocol) is carried on the fiber connection.

Originally there was 3 digit dialing. I remember 4 digit dialing and then 5 digit local dialing in my small SC town. Also the exchanges were named by the first two digits. Our town had HUnter 4 (484) and the county area HAzel 8 (428) plus the 4 digits, we had 5 digit dialing until the late 60s.

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Wanna hear a sweet sound? ... especially for us old farts.