I was ten years old before we had a phone in the house. My grandparents lived around the corner, and they had a phone, They had had phone service since the 1930's, but my parents decided a phone was a luxury, and didn't have one. That winter, my father went out of state to a a beekeepers convention in Little Rock Arkansas. Around the time he was to fly home, we had a massive snow storm. My mother trudged through knee deep snow to my the old farmhouse to use the phone. The house was cold because my grandparents were sensibly in Florida that January. Eventually everything worked out, he flew into Detroit, took a taxi to an Uncle's house, and we picked him up a day or so later, barely making our way through the snow. My mother decreed that a phone was no longer a luxury.
At first it was a party line. Two short rings was a call for us. One long ring was the Bader family, two long rings was the older couple across the street at the corner. When you picked up the phone, you had to check for a dial tone. Often you would pick up and one of the neighbors would be talking on the line, you had to wait for them to finish the call before you could make your call. Sometimes you just listened to hear the neighborhood gossip. A few years later everyone was converted to a private line.
And they were all rotary dial phones.
When I was in high school my parents bought a house in Florida, near the space center, a home I would live in for a couple of years after high school, and that they would retire to and live out the rest of their lives, they both died in that house. They had phones installed, and for the first time, they were touchpad dialing, not rotary. I had a phone in my bedroom for the first time.
I bought my first cell or mobile phone in 1996. I had moved to Kentucky, and was commuting 82 miles in each direction everyday to and from law school. The phone was huge by today's standards, and I was paying $30 a month, for 30 minutes a month of calls in a limited geographic area. If I went over the number of minutes additional minutes were about 50-cents each, calls outside the calling area were about the same cost.
I bought my first semi-smart phone when we were getting ready for a trip to England. I wanted a phone that would work across systems. The best option was a Blackberry. The salesman lied to me, he said in a week they wouldn't be able to pry it out of my hand, it only took about two days for me to feel that way. A couple of years after I moved to DC, I bought my first glass faced smartphone. 15 years later, I have had four of five of them. I use it daily, but seldom, very seldom for phone calls. They are great email devices, but really lousy phones unless you plug in a headset.
Last year, my phone broke just after we boarded the cruise ship for a month long adventure. I posted my daily selfie while having lunch on the ship, and the next time I pulled out my phone it was dead. I went a month without a phone, and guess what, I survived. My maternal grandmother, lived without a phone for the last 30 years of her life. I never talked with her over the phone, I was 4 or 5 years old when they sold the farm - and they never had a phone after that.
I wonder how many people under the age of 50 could figure out how to dial a call on the phone above?
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