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Dialing with the convenience of punch cards!
Tags: computers, mad science, phones, retrocomputing, toys
Current Music: Orion -- Call a Psychic ♬
11 Responses:
An elegant device for a more civilised age.
Ah, calling cards!
I can not believe that was a real thing. I assumed it must be something someone put together today as a joke, but no, real, back from when AT&T would sue you if you dared interfere with a phone.
I'm afraid I'm going to need a 1960's film strip with a chipper, disembodied male voice to explain this to me.
How about a classic MST3K short instead:
The punch card phone shows up at about the 5:50 mark. Note that the phone shown in the video is a multi-line model. Apparently both rotary dial and touch-tone dial versions exist too.
I'm surprised that pulse dialing still works.
Auto-dialing before speed dial!
Is this the first phone with internal memory?
I guess it's 'internal' memory, in that there's a slot on the back to hold all the punch-cards.
The other big benefit, besides convenience, was that this addressed the misdial problem. When you're rotating that dial by hand several times, it's not uncommon to get a digit wrong. Back when a long-distance call cost $3 for the first three minutes ($24 in today's money), that was a significant concern. And international long-distance calls cost several times more.
My dad and grandpa worked for a baby Bell, and I got to all the trade shows. Remember that all phones were the property of the phone company and made by the subsidiary Western Electric. This page shows the sequence of evolving models http://www.paul-f.com/weCardDialers.htm
My aunt worked at a Western Electric plant where they made telephones, but I’m not sure which ones they made (this was in the ‘70s). She was crabby and never took us nephews and nieces on a tour :-(