Telephone Nostalgia

The new Apple iPhone 4 comes out today in stores.

The media has reported that people are standing in line or camping out for this device for the past week. If you are like me, you might be thinking, ‘who cares?‘

I like my cellphone as much as any gadget I regularly use. It is right up there with the spoon and the remote control for the TV.

The one item I would probably use it more for would be computing. For me, the cell phone interface is too small to view and the ability to run multiple programs at the same time is somewhat limited. I prefer my desktop.

My grandmother lived to be 103 years old and I think quite a bit about the technological changes she saw in her lifetime. In here 90s she was shown a picture of ultrasound and she was completely bewildered. She could not imagine how the image was taken.

My mother would tell me stories about using a ‘party line’ in their tenement building in New York City where anyone could pick up the phone at any time and listen to your conversation. As a result, privacy obviously was compromised all the time.

When I was a kid, we had rotary phones and they were a giant pain to use. In my grandmother's town the population was small so that the phone numbers had 5 digits. Our town had 7 digits and my parents had a number with lots of 8s. There was no call waiting, or three way calling so a busy signal meant that you had to redial all over again. Dialing those 8s sucked!

My sisters and I used to call 2 numbers quite a bit. One was the time and temperature number. The second was the ‘chicken line’ where the noise on the other end always sounded like someone was killing a chicken.

I remember using the payphone as a kid and paying .10 per call. I don't think I have seen a payphone in a public place in several months.

Like most people, I have always had some suspicion about the power of telephone system, especially phone phreaking. As an adult, I became a big fan of 2600 magazine and continue to go to the bookstore and read it every month. The back of the magazine has always featured pictures of odd phones in odd places around the world. A big thank you to Shawn for turning me on!