Phones – They’ve Come A Long Way

Someone mentioned how using a “rotary phone” was a sign of their age earlier this evening.

That got me thinking.

When I was growing up my mother didn’t even have a phone in her house. If she needed to make a phone call she’d go to a phone box.

My grandparents on the other hand did have a phone, but it didn’t have a dial. You had to crank the phone’s dynamo before you made a call and then speak to the operator.

When they upgraded the local exchange and the number got longer (it had been town name followed by 3 digits!) the old phone was consigned to a cupboard full of junk. It stayed there for a few years until I was messing around with electronics and anything else that had any form of cabling. So naturally I had to dismember the phone to see how it all worked (which I probably failed to achieve, though it did keep me busy for a couple of hours).

Flash forward nearly 30 years.

The phone in my pocket is more powerful than a lot of desktop computers were a few short years ago. I do have a landline, but I rarely use it.

Our office uses VOIP to handle all our calls, both inbound and outbound.

The very concept of having to crank up a device to actually make a phonecall is probably so foreign to some people now that they might think I’m either mad or really really really old if I mentioned it.

And can you even remember the last time you saw a public phone box?