al mcguire Posted June 5, 2015 Report Share Posted June 5, 2015 What the iPhone Would Look Like if it Had Been Created in 1987 http://mentalfloss.com/article/64751/what-iphone-would-look-if-it-had-been-created-1987 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glen Trew Posted June 5, 2015 Report Share Posted June 5, 2015 Maybe 1977. DTMF "TouchTone" phones were more common in 1987. gt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Blankenship Posted June 6, 2015 Report Share Posted June 6, 2015 Maybe 1977. DTMF "TouchTone" phones were more common in 1987. Tough crowd. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boomboom Posted June 6, 2015 Report Share Posted June 6, 2015 (edited) so the Contempra was ahead of its time: it was curved... and backwards compatible Edited June 6, 2015 by Boomboom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sir Echo Posted March 29, 2017 Report Share Posted March 29, 2017 I'd pay a good penny for something like that in this era. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nicholas West Posted January 16, 2018 Report Share Posted January 16, 2018 I own an old 1989 Radioshack tone dialer. A smart phone from then would probably look a good deal like this. Minus any smart phone capabilities. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LarryF Posted January 16, 2018 Report Share Posted January 16, 2018 I think the main use of these tone dialers was to by bypass company phones, hotel lobby phones, school phones or what have you phones that had had the dial functions removed to prevent outgoing or long distance calls. I'm not sure what else you would do with them. (??) Best Regards, Larry Fisher Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay Rose Posted January 17, 2018 Report Share Posted January 17, 2018 Larry, they were used when you subscribed to a non-AT&T long distance service (I used one for MCI) and the phone company charged stiff fees for touchtone, so your actual desk phone had a dial. This even though tone dialing was cheaper for them to support. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LarryF Posted January 17, 2018 Report Share Posted January 17, 2018 Hi Jay, I'd forgotten about the touch tone extra charges. Aren't we glad all those big communication monopolies are gone? (Cough..cast) Best Regards, Larry Fisher Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay Rose Posted January 17, 2018 Report Share Posted January 17, 2018 That can also spark a discussion of language that has survived the obsolescence of the technology it refers to: Does anybody still "dial" a phone? Do kids even know what that word comes from? How about "dial tone"... which doesn't exist on the small phones most people carry. And those "telephones" do a lot of things that aren't related to hearing things over a distance... I've heard kids saying "repeating like a broken record". What's one of those? My favorite is when I discovered derivation of "wired", when it means "energetic, charged, hyper". It appears to come from the early history of our craft, when theaters were bragging about now being "wired for sound". That three-word phrase is almost a hundred years old -- and now doesn't refer to copper or loudspeakers -- but the new usage of both versions are found in Urban Dictionary. And coming up in a few years: Algorithm, which Wikipedia defines as an unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems. How could that possibly apply to what AI engines do in their hidden layers? Other examples? Branch to a different thread? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ao Posted January 27, 2018 Report Share Posted January 27, 2018 On 2018-01-16 at 10:56 PM, Jay Rose said: Larry, they were used when you subscribed to a non-AT&T long distance service (I used one for MCI) and the phone company charged stiff fees for touchtone, so your actual desk phone had a dial. This even though tone dialing was cheaper for them to support. another use was to remotely connect to your answering machine to retrieve messages, when confronted with a public rotary dial phone Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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