Jump to content

What the iPhone Would Look Like if it Had Been Created in 1987


al mcguire

Recommended Posts

  • 1 year later...
  • 9 months later...

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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
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

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...