December 10th, 2009
Remember when telephones had those rotary dials? When you actually had to rotate a plastic disk on a spring with your finger? And you cursed your friends who had a lot of 8s, 9s and 0s in their numbers because it took forever to dial them?
When I was a teenager I had an old 1962 bakelite telephone with a broken dial. I was allowed to have it because the plastic disc had jammed and wouldn't turn any more. (I contemplated trying to fix it with a blowtorch, as I'd had luck repairing other telephones with one. But I digress.)
I remember the stunning day that I learned I could just tap the receiver contacts in rapid succession for each number in the series of someone's telephone number and I could "dial" that number. If the number was 352, for example, I would tap very quickly: tap-tap-tap (pause) tap-tap-tap-tap-tap (pause) tap-tap (pause), etc. Tedious work and prone to errors. No matter how often I did it, I never perfected it; my error ratio was always pretty high.
And then, late nights in the 1980s with my telephone modem I used to dial BBSs using the "tap" method with that phone so I could connect my computer to others. Mistakes at 3:00 AM dialling some poor sod whose number just happened to be similar to the BBS's number I was trying to "dial".
But all the fun of rotary dials is gone. Soon the phone companies won't be supporting them any more. Kinda sad, though. All that retro technology is fun in its plain-headed simplicity. And I still have that 1962 bakelite phone and it still works—I even managed to fix the rotary dial. My daughter abuses it as a toy. Imagine that: nearly 50 years old and it works. Can any cheapo digital phone picked up at London Drugs, The Source, Wal Mart or other discount outlet perform that well? Not a chance.
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