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Exploring and having fun with rotary telephones

63 points| daniel_j | 1 year ago |danieljones.au

54 comments

order

jtwaleson|1 year ago

Very nice job! Last month I also adapted a rotary phone but I replaced the insides with a Bluetooth chip (and some more). Now I can use it as a headset for my smartphone or laptop. While you had to learn about SIP and voltage converters I had to learn about Bluetooth and digital audio protocols. Looks like we both had fun ;)

https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...

nja|1 year ago

Wow, this is a project I've been kicking around for years! I have an old red rotary phone (a bit newer than yours) held aside just for it.

Definitely bookmarking your post

Syzygies|1 year ago

I grew up with no choice in this matter. Then there was a period when "touch" dialing was available for an exhorbitant premium.

There's something so Brooklyn / Portland about wanting to relive this for the romance. It sucked.

macintux|1 year ago

As a kid, I always had this fear that if I had to dial 0 and I waited too long before the next digit, the operator would be summoned to the line. Waiting for that 0 to finish its long turn was stressful.

mmcgaha|1 year ago

In the 90s there was a charge on my mom's phone bill for touch tone dialing. I called up to dispute the charges but the phone company wouldn't have any of it so I had them remove the "service" and they warned me that she wouldn't be able to dial out any more. I flipped a switch on her phone to simulate pulse dialing and a few months later switched it back. She was never charged again.

daniel_j|1 year ago

For me it is a lot about the noise and feeling of the dial, I get satisfaction out of them. Can you expand on Brooklyn/Portland? Is that hipster or something? I can imagine it did suck to _actually_ use, the faster 20pps dials feel quite a lot faster.

praptak|1 year ago

A fun fact about pulse dial is that you can dial a digit d by quickly tapping the switch hook d times (zero is 10 taps).

This is useful for dialing from a phone with the dial intentionally disabled or removed.

Stratoscope|1 year ago

I've shared this story before, but you may find it amusing:

Back in 1996, I was living in Almaden Valley (South San Jose) and we had underground utilities. We also lived on top of an underground stream. After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy!

I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police. Open up!"

I asked the officers what the problem was and they said "We got a 911 call with no one on the line. We tried to call you back, but no one answered. So we had to come out and investigate."

I invited them in and said, "I think I know what happened." They followed me over to the landline speakerphone in the kitchen and listened to the clicking.

Then I explained, "You remember the old rotary dial phones? They worked by making and breaking the circuit, just like this clicking. Even if we all have touch-tone phones these days, the phone lines are still compatible with the rotary dial. So somewhere in the midst of all this clicking, there were nine fast clicks in a row, and then one click, and one more. And that dialed 911. Sorry about that!"

thaumasiotes|1 year ago

Why would a phone with the dial intentionally disabled be connected to anything?

svilen_dobrev|1 year ago

in 1980-90ies, playing with the switch was the way to get to "external" and dial things outside of a hotel (or office or factory, for example). And it worked because the central city-level switch-stations were replaced with much-faster-digital ones, while the local hotel/office/whatever were still old slow ones. So the old ones missed the too-fast-random-pulses series while the central ones picked it. Eh, one has to try multiple times to win that lottery..

gorgoiler|1 year ago

The British GPO746 is another classic model in this category. Just like UK Mellor-style traffic lights, the design was licensed to multiple manufacturers each of whom had their own quirks. This should be labelled as a nerd cognitohazard — once you know, you are at risk of trying to collect one of each type and then compare them (phones and traffic lights)!

I too have had little luck getting my hardware to activate the phone’s chimes but that at least led me to another fun quirk. The cabling for the phone has named wires that corresponded to the original switchboard connectors, which looked like enormous headphone jacks. They had two contacts: one at the tip of the plug and one for the collar that sits around the plug behind the tip, separated by insulation. The collar is ring shaped so this part of the circuit is called the ring connection.

Whoever dreamt that naming scheme up? It would be like calling the dial — where you set in the number you wanted to dial with you hand — the hand-set! Or calling a mute button the ear-peace!

aworks|1 year ago

I'm usually good at avoiding visual distractions but I gave up trying to read this.

butz|1 year ago

Check if your browser has "Reader mode". On Firefox there is a button in URL bar or you can press Ctrl+Alt+R.

spc476|1 year ago

If you are on Firefox, you can select "View->Page Style->No Style" for easier reading in this case.

SoftTalker|1 year ago

The site has a very '90s vibe.

daniel_j|1 year ago

yeah sorry about that, I've removed the cool walking background sprite. I'm going for a 90's theme, where eveyrthing looked awful but felt really personal

BrandoElFollito|1 year ago

In the 80's we were calling friends in Poland from France. Together with my brother, we were tasked to turn the dial over and over again -- you would need 1 or 2 hours of dialing to get through (I still have the automatic failure message in my head).

We found all kinds of tricks to protect our fingers. Today I would try to build a manual dialer based of an ESP32 or something :)

8bitsrule|1 year ago

The article's link to sip2sip.info usefully led to a SIP Settings page, which in turn discussed NAT traversal & linked to how to 'Turn off SIP ALG support in your router' on another helpful site.

xhkkffbf|1 year ago

Are there any VOIP boxes that work with dial phones?

daniel_j|1 year ago

The Grandstream HT802 is the device I am using. It allows two analog phones (including dial phones) to connect to a VOIP provider. Each phone can have different servers.