Telephones... then and now

[k0ua]

I remember when you bought a phone and needed to provide the ringer equivalent to the Telco...

The last time I did that no one knew what I was talking about...

We bought the phones we had in the house when they were offered... Grandma kept paying for hers... when she passed the phone company did not want it back...

Mom's phones still have the sticker on the bottom as proof they were purchased.

I remember an older lady brought her phone in not many years ago. I was alone in the office so she turned it in to me and said she no longer wanted it and wanted to get the bill for the instrument stopped. I looked at the date code on the phone and I think it was 30 or 40 years old. She had been paying for it all that time. Probably could have bought 100 of them for what she payed the company in monthly rental. I would not be surprised if somewhere there is someone still paying rental on some old desk or wall phone.

 

[k0ua]

I think the last switchboard operator, at least in the West, was the operator on Catalina Island off the Southern CA coast.

There are plenty of PBX switchboard operators alive and well and working every day around here.

 

[ultrarunner]

There are plenty of PBX switchboard operators alive and well and working every day around here.

Just did a quick search... apparently it is Catalina as the last ATT switchboard operator... had a friend living there at the time and they did a big production with the decommissioning.

Trivia Question 2/14/13 – The Last Switchboard | Los Angeles Emergency Repeater Association

You might enjoy this...

AT&T Archives : Good-Bye, Central (with Bonus Edition Introduction)

I remember Virginia City...

 

[ultrarunner]

As a kid in Lake Tahoe we would hike up a mountain to the MicroWave relay station... we thought it was really cool as the station had it's own full size cable car that was self propelled with a diesel? motor inside the cable car...

Northern California Echo Summit

I thought this was one of the coolest jobs ever...

 

[MossRoad]

There are plenty of PBX switchboard operators alive and well and working every day around here.

Corporate canned ours about three years ago. All menu driven now. And VOIP... sounds flat. No warmth.

 

[ultrarunner]

I've noticed VOIP just isn't the same... at least to my ear.

 

[George2615]

I thought Ernestine was the last switchboard operator.

Lily Tomlin as telephone operator Ernestine - YouTube

 

[Bird]

I'll never forget working a part time job at night at a Marriott Motel in 1968. It was a big place with a 24/7 restaurant and, of course, a switchboard 24/7. The night operator "sounded" on the phone like a sweet young thing and men were always trying to get a date with her. In reality, she was in her 80s and had retired from the phone company.:laughing: It was hard to imagine a voice like that coming from a lady that age.

 

[mark02tj]

I've noticed VOIP just isn't the same... at least to my ear.

It's not. I've been using VOIP since '03 via Vonage. Overall I've been happy with it (although I want to switch to something cheaper), but it does have its quirks. And when you get VOIP on both ends of the conversation (which is the norm now), you get "lag" in the conversation. In other words, by the time you hear the end of a sentence, the other person had actually finished it a second or two ago. So now you have people interrupting each other on conversations more than they did in the past because they don't realize the other person had started speaking again.

Also, it seems that you hear "echoing" of conversations a lot on VOIP now.

 

[k0ua]

There are also "artifacts" in VOIP calls. You notice them the most in lulls in the conversation. Most people probably do not notice them. We have all grown used to less than ideal sound quality over the years. We no longer talk about "pin drop" audio quality. Now we have "cell phone" quality and call it good. If it hadn't come on gradually we would all have staged a revolt. But it came on gradually, and we are used to it now. Even all long haul circuits are VOIP, well everything is VOIP now. Lots of advantages, but high quality is not one of them.