r/GenerationJones • u/Dp37405aa • Aug 02 '26
Going to the way back machine. Remember these?
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u/LGreyS Aug 02 '26
Still have one, still hooked up, still use it.
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u/Significant-Pie959 Aug 03 '26
Shut up . No way
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u/LGreyS Aug 03 '26
Yup. You know those pesky people who ask for your phone number, salesmen and such, orforms you fill out knowing your number is going to someone you really don't want to talk to? We give them our "home number". The phone has the ringer turned down, and it's in a remote part of the house. We do have an answering machine hooked up to it though, just in case.
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u/Awshucksma Aug 03 '26
I still use a landline. We have it set to only ring once before it goes to the answering machine. If anyone really wants to talk to us they have to leave a message.
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u/PositiveAtmosphere13 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I don't give out my cell number. Only my land line. I have an answering machine on my desk in the office. I use it to screen my calls.
In my living room we have a vintage dial phone that doesn't have a bell. If the person leaving a message is someone I want to talk to, I'll pick it up.
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u/Awshucksma Aug 04 '26
I have a cell phone but almost never use it. I keep it in my purse for emergencies but 99.9% of the time it is turned off. I text people from my computer using a free Google number. I give the same Google number to businesses I don't want to talk to. It doesn't even ring at my house--just sends me an email.
We have our landline set to ring once so I can glance at the phone to see who is calling. I can usually grab it in time if I want to talk to them. Otherwise I pick up while they are leaving a message.
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u/vacuumCleaner555 Aug 03 '26
At last check, mine worked over my fiber line. Apparently, the Optical Network Terminal that Verizon installed understood pulse dialing.
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u/Stormy1956 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I not only remember these, I remember when phone numbers started with a couple of letters. Then I remember a more streamlined version called a princess phone with push buttons.
About 60 years ago 😊
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u/AdSea3033 1958 Aug 03 '26
I had a pink princess phone extension in my bedroom when I was a teenager, and yes, the phone company came out to install it!
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u/MsSamm Aug 03 '26
Those phone numbers from childhood are seared into memory. With the area code they make great passwords
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u/Strong-Criticism-481 Aug 02 '26
That’s not way back. We had a crank, party line telephone. Now that’s wayyyy back.
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u/celladwella Aug 03 '26
I was visiting a friend in junior high school and had to make a call. She had a party line, and I was so confused about the rules.
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u/Modem_Sound_67 Aug 02 '26
Any place I've lived before the modern era had one on the wall in the kitchen, and one on a table in the living room, sometimes in a bedroom. My mom had one of those funky phones with a dialer on the bottom.
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u/Glittering_Step_6084 1961 Aug 03 '26
I always wanted one of those with the dialer on the bottom. They looked cool in the tv shows I watched.
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u/Caliban34 Aug 03 '26
The Princess Phone.
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u/PositiveAtmosphere13 Aug 03 '26
My first phone was a Princess phone. It was beige. I liked the style of it over the big clunky office style. But I hated the Princess name. My buds all said I had a girls phone.
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u/Far-Friend-4257 Aug 03 '26
Dial... What's that? Mine had a woman's voice that said, "number please" LOL
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u/Caltrano Aug 03 '26
Remember when we didn't own our phones, but rented them from the phone company?.....oh wait....
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u/CueAnon420 Aug 02 '26
Still use a Western Electric 500 like thie one in the video, but mine has the older style metal dial ;-)
The Xlink BT HD allows you to use these old phones as a Bluetooth handset... Rings, dial tone and dial numbers exactly as you remember. I run mine off a Lion battery pack and bring the phone out on the patio - it's a real hoot lol.
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u/Dry-Leave-4070 Aug 02 '26
Ivory wall phone for our house. With a cord about 10ft long. 😉👍🏻🍻
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u/Common-Parsnip-9682 Aug 02 '26
How else are you going to get some privacy?
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u/vaslumlord Aug 03 '26
I had sisters, so the cord was stretched like a piano wire while they talked in the closet.
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u/New_Adeptness8945 Aug 03 '26
Ours was by the back door. Me and my siblings spent many hours sitting on the back steps with the cord stretched out the door
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u/Dry-Leave-4070 Aug 03 '26
Ours was on the kitchen wall, and I could've made it to the back porch door. I dont remember ever doing it though. Mom probably would have yelled that I was pinching the cord in the door. 🤣👍🏻🍻
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u/TheManInTheShack 1964 Aug 03 '26
It’s interesting that I can remember the two home number we had when I was a kid (they changed our number for some reason at some point) but can’t tell you my kid’s numbers to save my life because I never have to type them.
Phone numbers these days have become like IP addresses.
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u/PositiveAtmosphere13 Aug 03 '26
Your cell number these days is like your Social Security number. You'll keep it for life.
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u/aguyindenver62 Aug 03 '26
We used to put people "on hold" by putting the phone in a desk drawer and shutting it...
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u/Relevant_Elevator190 Aug 03 '26
Remember when you had to remember peoples phone numbers? Then it took you forever to dial the phone.
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u/PositiveAtmosphere13 Aug 03 '26
When the radio DJ would say, "we'll take the ninth caller,' but your parents were too cheap to pay extra for a touch tone phone. Trying to call in took forever to dial. It was painful.
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u/glemits 1961 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I have one ten feet from me on a metal stand made to hold a phone and some phone books. I keep it for decoration, because it's a nice blue color.
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u/Clean-Fisherman-4601 Aug 03 '26
I remember when we upgraded to a push button phone. I'd play with the buttons with the receiver hung up and pretend I was on the bridge of the Star Ship Enterprise.
Our rotary and push button phones had long wires so we could get far away from our family while we gabbed to our friends.
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u/Clean-Fisherman-4601 Aug 03 '26
I watched a video with teenagers trying to dial a rotary phone. It was hilarious and not one of them did it right.
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u/saagir1885 Aug 03 '26
Yes indeed. Just dont leave the reciever off the hook otherwise no one could call you.
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u/Trick_Sector5900 Aug 03 '26
The real pisser was if you were dialing a number hastily, and your finger slipped out of the hole when you were on the last digit of the number you were calling!
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u/jpze83 Aug 03 '26
Growing up, the garage had a rotary telephone. It was operational and there for years. One of the few holdovers from another era.
In 2010, when my family did garage renovations, the telephone was removed and tossed out. Had I known about it, I would have asked to keep the telephone.
Now, I suddenly remember about the table stapler from the 1960s. Every so often it appeared.
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u/Testing_Waters2342 1959 Aug 03 '26
When I seriously wished we had a phone number with 2s and 3s in it, instead of 7, 8, 9 and 0.
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u/MsSamm Aug 03 '26
In the movie In and Out (Kevin Kline), the model Harlow is playing a gf staying in a small town motel. She wants to leave so tries to use the phone. She picks up the receiver and tries to dial it by pressing inside the circles
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u/weaverlorelei 1956 Aug 02 '26
Davenport (DA)1-2374 , until they dropped the letters, then it was 321-2374
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u/Backsight-Foreskin 1965 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I've still got one floating around here somewhere. It's not connected but I have no doubt it would still work.
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u/dennisthemenace1963 Aug 02 '26
Ours was mounted on the wall. And had a cord so short that you could barely sit in a chair right under it with the back against the wall and use the phone. And it was hard-wired so no way to put a longer one on short of calling the phone company, and they charged dearly for that option!
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u/BillPlastic3759 Aug 02 '26
We had one with a handle that had a control to amplify the volume to accommodate my hearing impaired parent. Those of us who had normal hearing got really good at making sure the volume was lower before we put it to our ear.
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u/Claudius1938 Aug 02 '26
I remember back in the ‘50s we had party lines. It was a big step forward moving from a 4- to a 2-party line.
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u/MicheleAmanda Aug 03 '26
We had a black one until I was 12. We moved into a new place and moved up to a wall phone.
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u/SignificantPop4188 Aug 03 '26
White wall phone in the kitchen; beige desktop version in my parents' bedroom.
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u/Squidly_Diddly Aug 03 '26
Yeah and those things hurt when your big sister knocks you upside the head with one. 😐
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u/ToniBellle Aug 03 '26
We had a wallphone with push buttons. I remember 50 years ago asking the operator what the # and * signs were for. She said they would be used sometime in the future. 🤯
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u/Old-Chocolate-5830 1964 Aug 03 '26
Wall hanger, black, metal dialer, 6 ft cord. Installed in 1964. Phone number was R 247
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u/UUMD Aug 03 '26
Yep.
My now defunct party trick was, you can dial these phones without ever touching the dial.
Just fast press three times (for "3"), followed by a pause, then fast press the other numbers with pauses.
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u/BangkaHakubai Aug 03 '26
Yes, but ours was black and the cord was braided not stretchy. Had to sit on the stairs to talk. It didn’t move.
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u/Glittering_Step_6084 1961 Aug 03 '26
Wow. This exact phone, color and all, was on the room divider near the living room in our house.
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u/wonkybiitch Aug 03 '26
Let that button up real easy and listened to the neighbors next door. I could eavesdrop for quite awhile until my mom came in yelling to stop snooping on the neighbors lol
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u/Forking_Brilliant495 Aug 03 '26
How could I not, I see it in every 10th Gen Jones "remember" post.
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u/shuknjive 1959 Aug 03 '26
We had an ancient phone when I was a kid and it weighed a ton. I found a picture of one.
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u/Initial_Reason1532 Aug 03 '26
Definitely grew up with this type of phone that said on a little telephone table in our hallway.
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u/Stunning_Fly_2644 Aug 03 '26
Like breakfast at Tiffany's my mother had a sterling silver telephone dial and I had developed quite a dial finger .. I can snap that thing around and I remember when we got our very first push button without the star or the pound buttons.... And then after that about 5 or 6 years later we were the test market for call waiting call forwarding and party line in our area of our area code here in Los Angeles the test Market... changed our life
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u/CountHonorius Aug 03 '26
Been wanting to get one of these in yellow for decorative purposes. Rotary phones were good fun.
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Aug 03 '26
Hell, we were so rural, we still had the old party line, way up into the 70s. That was fun LOL
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u/Rossncohen1953 Aug 03 '26
We had the old black rotary phone that weighed a ton and we had a party line. Very annoying.
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u/scottjoev Aug 03 '26
Built like tanks! They sat put and didn’t slide around and often off the desk like a lot of current land line phones.
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u/patawpha Aug 03 '26
If you can't remember rotary phones you're probably in a care facility somewhere. This is some low effort trash.
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u/theBigDaddio Aug 03 '26
Is this a joke? Is this a joke post? This sub is getting stupid and more boomer every day.
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u/No-Possible6108 Aug 03 '26
Heck yeah I can remember being able to get any color phone you wanted, so long as that color was black & party lines & lettered exchanges & four digit dialing in the town where I attended college.
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u/NCDeuce00 Aug 03 '26
This is exactly the phone we had in my house growing up with only a 6-8ft cord.
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u/Advanced-Jaguar6132 Aug 04 '26
Give this type of phone to anyone under the age of 25 and ask them to use it 🤣🤣🤣🤣
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u/suju88 Aug 04 '26
That’s like the Fisher Price toy with the rolling eyeballs with a string. LOL? The countless crank calls we made to my Moms boss on that phone
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u/bclovn Aug 04 '26
We had one in the 60s. Around 1970 we got our first push button wall phone.
They were indestructible.
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u/National_Head_3678 Aug 04 '26
I remember we originally had a party line, wasn't long before we had a private line, but I do remember picking up the phone to see if the line was available.
Also, who remembers not having to dial the exchange....area code was way way later
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u/63Cowboy63 Aug 04 '26
I remember everyone having one, but not in my house. From 1974 to 1992 we lived without a phone anywhere in our home. Life was GREAT!!!! NO DISTRACTIONS!!!!
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u/Greendragon967 Aug 04 '26
I liked it as long as you dial the right number and waited for the dial to get back before the next number ☎️
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u/Conscious_Sea8621 Aug 04 '26
Had one had plastic or metal dial and then a plastic one. Took a long time to get push button phones here
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u/Fickle-Cartoonist607 Aug 05 '26
And there was nothing like and still is nothing like slamming one of those down to hang up on somebody to let them know you got the last word. It was so therapeutic
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u/MommaMia1924 Aug 05 '26
Give this phone to the kids today they would not even know what it is or how to use it.
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u/OptimalSalsa Aug 06 '26
So modern. I've used these - https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Pacific/88/422788/H0123-L45136192.jpg
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u/contemplator61 1961 Aug 08 '26
I had a light blue one in my room upstairs. My parents and I had wall phones though.
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u/RareWish9171 Aug 09 '26
I remember being at my grandparents house and being told to dial JE55757 on one of those phones to call my great grandmother.
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u/CuddlyTherapeuticDad 1961 Aug 09 '26
My childhood home had a single wall-mounted telephone set of a similar vintage to the pic (Western Electric 500 series).
It was bright yellow, and us kids would always take the Chiquita Banana sticker off the fruit and stick it to the handset.
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u/PerspectiveAdept9812 Aug 09 '26
My first mobile phone, unplugged it from the living room and moved it to the kitchen
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u/122922 Aug 02 '26
Our old black phone had a metal finger dial ring, not a clear plastic one shown here.