[Big Mike]

Originally Posted by YNOBIL

I'm still trying to figure out how to work this phone.

Hope you aren't still paying a leasing fee. My mom was paying for her phone into the 60's......

[YNOBIL]

Originally Posted by Greg Reid

I've got one older than that Bill. Found this pic on the web...and yes, it works. Date stamped 1923. Wooden terminal block inside and brass ringers.

Your picture is the same as my phone only my transmitter and receiver are combined into the handset. If you look closely at mine you'll see a little rectangle in the center where the transmitter used to be mounted. My phone has the 2 large brass ringers too and when the phone rings the wall actually vibrates. I don't have it hooked up put my oldest phone is from the 30's.

[Old Goat 67]

Alright, that's enough already.

I'm a retired telephone man too and I have one older than both of you....

But I put a TT pad in the writing desk, so I guess maybe I'm out....

Boy, did we ever get off topic here.

Charles

[YNOBIL]

Originally Posted by Old Goat 67

Alright, that's enough already.

I'm a retired telephone man too and I have one older than both of you....

But I put a TT pad in the writing desk, so I guess maybe I'm out....

Boy, did we ever get off topic here.

Charles

Sorry, I started this whole crazy topic. But now we know who the phone guys are.

[Old Blue 66]

Originally Posted by Old Goat 67

Alright, that's enough already.

I'm a retired telephone man too and I have one older than both of you....

But I put a TT pad in the writing desk, so I guess maybe I'm out....

Boy, did we ever get off topic here.

Charles

Maybe we should steer this thread towards Miley Cyrus and her incredible knack for searching out old world spider monkeys in the Burmese Jungle and why its important to her that its the ninth in the twelve-year cycle of animals which appear in the Chinese zodiac related to the Chinese calendar?

[Steve's birds]

Miley Cyrushouse was broken into 2nd tine in 2014, and her $100, 000 Maserati stolen. All the young people know that. They devour that sctick on their smart phones. They don't read boojs, newspapers, and don't pay for magazine subscriptions.

I work with 70 of them, and that is my observation from years of "break time" in the same room. This is why print is collapsing at a dizzying rate. Blame Kardashians for creating more excitement than .pontiac could, and our slogan was "driving excitement".

I'm very bummed, because si much if what made our little workd orbit got its financial awareness , abpnd pitential new sales through the printed word.

That is why I always paid forward, lest mass support falter, quality drop and we collectively get screwed.

If you were building a way cool car like our Canadian pontiacer from Quebec, in his Sunfire morphed into a 69 Judge that was over the top cool, and proved its appeal by being a guy magnet at Norwalk, now the incentive to build that huge 300 hr project is gone!

And we be screwed as a result.

[John V.]

Big article in my Sunday paper, headline, "Is Our Love Affair With Driving Over?".

Miles driven in the US is down and dropping, kids are delaying or not even getting a license.

I believe they said something like 70% of 17 yos have a license down from 87% at the peak.

They cited various reasons. One was essentially that younger people don't feel the need to jump in the car and go visit friends, they communicate by text and other social media instead.

Different world now.

If I may jump into the phone guy fray. Not one myself but my grandfather worked 40 yrs or so for NY Bell. Retired in '65.

I have no phones, but a couple years ago my uncle gave me a flashlight that was my grandfather's. Not sure what he might have used it for on the job, but it says "BELL SYSTEM" on the clip. I don't know how old it is, from what I can google, Bond Electric made this style flashlight from the '20s to maybe the '50s.

I'd have to ask my mom about what exactly he did, AFAIK he worked in the office, I think he started out on the switchboard back when an operator had to connect the call. I know he worked the Bell exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, I think they may have set up a switchboard for that.

Phone service has come a long way from those days.

Leasing the phone in the '60s? That went on until the '80s! I was married before Illinois Bell first allowed customers to buy their phones. I remember it was a pretty steep price to buy the old phone we had been "renting" from them. I'm thinking we paid something like $60 for our "trimline" desk phone. A couple years later, you could buy the same thing new for $10.

What a racket that was, sell old equipment to dupes like me! I still shake my head about that.

Reminds me of another developing trend.

We still have a land line at the house. But all of my 4 kids use a mobile phone exclusively, no land line. None of them subscribe to cable or dish either.

I think most of my peers still keep a land line service, but I know some that don't. That is something I think is dying out, same as print media.

[Greg Reid]

Dropped my in house phone line about 6 months ago. Just didn't make sense any longer. The only people that called it any more were telemarketers and recordings for politicians at election time.

[19652plus2]

This morning, I called the number on the Automatic Renewal Program postcard I received ( 800-568-6130) and the rep adamantly stated that the mag is continuing but undergoing changes (going digital, too). What's going on?

[Steve's birds]

Tele-marketing is compartmentalized, and possibly outsourced. Technically, if content sort of goes forward into hot rod, they may be script trained to deny what is actually happening.


The point about who uses landline is same as who reads. - anything. But I remember 9/11. And F5 tornados, and Katrina, and East Coast Tsunami. Each time you super stress the digital wireless network, it fails utterly and horrifically. Therefore, I keep landline at a house. Its a cheap insurance policy. It won't go down unless all the power grid goes down. If that occurs, we suffered an attack far worse than a pulse EMI bomb.

[Greg Reid]

Good point about the landline in an emergency.... I do at least have a 12v ham radio though....

[YNOBIL]

I have 12 cordless phones in my house, when the power goes out the only phone that works is my 1946 wall phone pictured earlier.

[John V.]

Cordless phones go dead if the power goes out. We keep an old hard wired phone around in the event of power outages.

But outages happen so rarely, hard to justify the service for that. Last time I can remember our power being out for more than an hour or two was during the '05 hurricane season.

Main reason I like the land line is because of call clarity. That has become less of an issue as the cell phones and service have improved.

And I suspect my kids are typical. They rarely talk on the phone. They text. Call clarity means little or nothing to them.

[John V.]

I remember explaining to my kids why we "dial" the phone even though nobody uses a rotary dial phone anymore (YNOBIL the exception!).

Some day my kids will probably have to explain to their kids why we say "talk" on the phone when nobody uses their voice anymore on the phone, it will all be text messages. Or maybe voice to text.

I can picture it now. I'll say to my phone, "text to Bill, what ya doing?" and Bill's phone will receive my text and say to him, "text from John, what ya doing?". And back and forth it will go with both of us talking to our phones but not to each other. And that will be considered a conversation.

When I ask one of my kids today if they've talked to their brothers recently, they always say yes but then I'll discover that they didn't actually "talk". Only texted.

Strange new world.

[GOAT WHORE]

This thread has takin a crazy twist. Ah, the good ole days!

[428RA4]

Um, John -

You already can tell your phone to "dial"someone and leave messages.

;o)

[sdbob]

I 'still' listen before dialing!? Why? we had a partyline when I was young can't seem to break that habit. WE have a phone in the basement with a crank handle.

[ho428]

"Sara, This is Barney, get me Thelma Lou over at the Blue Bird"

[sdbob]

Yes . Made me chuckle . Seems strange now but that's the way it was--listen to gossip.

[aukc]

Originally Posted by 19652plus2

This morning, I called the number on the Automatic Renewal Program postcard I received ( 800-568-6130) and the rep adamantly stated that the mag is continuing but undergoing changes (going digital, too). What's going on?

My only knowledge of the magazine publishing business is as a subscriber, so I welcome clarification from those that know more about that business, but my understanding is that when you subscribe to a magazine, in exchange for the money you give to the publisher, the publisher agrees to provide you with a magazine of the publisher’s choice. The customer may think there is an obligation to receive a specific magazine, but I believe the “fine print” only requires the publisher to provide a magazine of any type.

As a result, when a specific magazine title is dis-continued, as long as the publisher is able to substitute another magazine of some sort, then the publisher is fulfilling their agreed obligation to the customer, therefore since the customer continues to receive something, as far as the publisher is concerned there is no change to the agreement that is worthy of informing the customer about.

I’m not saying this is moral, or ethical, but I believe this is how magazine subscriptions work.