Rotary-dial phones

[pne]

Prompted by seeing Amy playing with an old rotary-dial phone she got from her grandparents, and seeing that she didn't know what to do with the dial (she only picked up the receiver and talked). No wonder, since I doubt she's seen one before, and it's likely she won't be seeing (m)any in the future, either.

(Funny that the little icon for "phone" used in various places is nearly always a rotary-dial one, though!)

[Poll #1170050]

Comments

[crayolaab.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, my mother still has a rotary dial phone at home, but I moved away and haven't used it since ;) I did use it all through my childhood however.

[purple-pen.livejournal.com]

This is my main phone. Although I do have a touch-tone one, too. You have to for getting through the menus when you call an automated system.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I grew up with rotary-dial phones, and remember my first exposure to push-button phones in about 1975. I couldn't say when I last used a rotary dial, somewhere between 1980 and 1990. Grandma had one until she needed a phone with an amplifying earpiece, and got one that had buttons. I guessed.

[nyssa.livejournal.com]

We had a rotary dial phone when I was very, very little. My first phone calls were made on that phone. But I couldn't tell you how old I was when we got rid of it...

[apel.livejournal.com]

The first phone I owned was a yellow rotary phone. I loved it. A couple of years later, probably in 1985, I bought my first push-button phone. It was blue and had ten memory positions. :-) Well 11 actually, one for the last dialled number too.

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1984, but both sets of my grandparents had (and still have) rotary phones and so I used them at their house growing up.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I've actually used a rotary *pay* phone before, which was kinda weird. It was the Boy Scout camp that I went to, and I think I found some information on it that indicated that it had been installed in the early '70s.

[crayolaab.livejournal.com]

mta - I was born in 82 :)

[dampscribbler.livejournal.com]

I answered 1986-1990, because I know for certain it's true, but it's likely true that it was the next bracket up. My grandparents had several (heavy) rotary-dial phones in their home until approx 1993 when they were forced by their phone company to switch to touch-tone phones throughout.

I honestly don't know how often I use "dial" a number rather than "call" a number, but I hazard to guess it's less than 1:3. I'd much rather explain that I'm "dialing" a number than "pushing" a number, though. :)

[volantwish]

When I was little, we had a red rotary phone in the basement. I always thought it was cool because the dial was on the bottom and you had to pick it up to use it. It was never our main phone though, and I never placed calls from the basement until after we'd already replaced the phone. (circa 1993?)

I use "dial" to describe the physical act of pushing the buttons and "call" to describe actually placing a call. (e.g., "I started dialing Bob's number, but then I remembered he was out of town. I didn't call him.")

[hidden-kitten.livejournal.com]

My dad kept a rotary phone in his kitchen until about 1992, when he got a mock rotary phone (it has bells and looks like a rotary, but is actually buttons...big thing, too). I also had a rotary phone as a toy when I was little. I dialed 911 on it once and laughed at how long it took.

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

I don't remember having a rotary phone at home, but I do remember that our old push-button phone was set to pulse (to imitate a rotary phone) because the phone company charged a surcharge for touch-tone service. This was probably early-mid-90s.

[conuly]

I used a rotary phone in elementary school once or twice as a child, when I got sick and had to go to the office to go home, but already they were nearly obsolete - they only were in the school because NYC public schools don't really see the need to dump old stuff before they get new.

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Agreed. "Dialing a phone" is entering the numbers, regardless of whether it involves a 'dial' of any kind.

[alsatia.livejournal.com]

*twitch* Too many questions where none of the choices was what I wanted to answer.

I was born in 1980 and we still had a rotary dial phone when we moved in 1988, but I don't know precisely when we replaced it. We definitely didn't have it anymore by 1994, but that range overlaps the options in the poll.

I've always used the term "dial" in regards to phone numbers, and while I know the origin (and thus can't say I didn't think of the connection) it's not accurate for me to say that I think it doesn't fit, because frankly I'm annoyed when people refuse to accept that words develop new meanings over time and get all anal about how "that's not what it used to mean".

But aside from the poll...Amy would know how to use a phone with a keypad? I don't even remember using a phone before I was 6 or 7, and I'm pretty sure at that point I didn't dial it myself, just talked when a family member handed me the receiver. Oh how the times are changing.

[jc.livejournal.com]

Our rotary phone was obsolesced by the arrival of ADSL, as the microfilter deaded the ringing circuit in the master telephone socket. (See "ring wire removal" on this page (http://www.readman.dsl.pipex.com/other/UKphonecatwiring.htm) for info.)

[tungol.livejournal.com]

We had only a rotary phone until 1994 or so, and I think we had a rotary phone as one option for another few years after that. I may well have used one even later but I don't remember.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. I think that we used pulse dialling for years even after we replaced our rotary-dial phone with a keypad model. In fact, I think that touch-tone dialling wasn't even available where we lived for several years after we switched to keypad.

[pne.livejournal.com]

But aside from the poll...Amy would know how to use a phone with a keypad?

Well, not in the sense that she could use a real phone to call a real person by dialling their number, but in the sense that she understands the concept "you have to press some buttons before the other person will answer".

Though now that you mention it, I don't even know whether she knows that concept.

[blob.livejournal.com]

Ours was ivory-coloured Bakelite, kind of yellowed from my grandparents' cigarette smoke. Mmm.

[pthalo]

I had never connected it in English, but I'd made connection to one of the serbian words for "to call someone" and a rotary dial phone

[conuly]

She's still, what, three? If she doesn't know now, she will soon.

Which reminds me, I need to teach Ana my phone number. (I say mine because I go out most often with her, and because I'm the one most likely to hear my phone ringing and pick it up - her parents have phone issues.)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Yes, three. Turning four in September.

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

Oh I have too, but it's been quite a while. They used to have them in my home town, at least until I was in HS when a majority of the rotary dials became pushbuttons. :-)

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

iconlove :D
I used to love that book/movie so much that we chose which plot our house would be built on based on the fact that the name of our street sounds a lot like a location in the book. :D

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

James is the same way. He knows you have to push buttons to call people and that you push a certain set of numbers to call the police (he thinks it's 991 XD).

[sedesdraconis.livejournal.com]

When my grandparents moved in with us they had a rotary phone. It got replaced sometime not too many years after that, and I disassembled it to look at the mechanical pieces and steal the actual brass bells inside.

But, "I've played with the guts of one" wasn't one of the options :p

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

My parents didn't stop using a rotary-dial phone until 1996, so up until that point, I used one every time I made a call from their house.

[fridoline.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that I dialed on a rotary phone before, but I cannot say whether it was the one my parents used to have, a public phone, or just the FisherPrice toy phone.

I cannot remember though actually making a phone call to somebody else with a rotary phone.

[nitaq.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's because I'm German I never thought about dialing as anything else, but wählen. In German that's not necessarily something to do with Wählscheibe. OK, now that you mention it, of course the noun dial refers to a Wählscheibe, but I couldn't think of anything else but a phone using one.
There are loads of "disks" one turns to a setting, but that wouldn't be dialing to me. I think I've always kind of thought wählen was about choosing a number in German.

[pne.livejournal.com]

OK, now that you mention it, of course the noun dial refers to a Wählscheibe, but I couldn't think of anything else but a phone using one.

*nod* I think most people think of the verb as a completely unrelated word to the noun "dial", even though they are spelled the same; the origin of the word is irrelevant to them.

Sort of like "sich bewerben" that I talked about at one point - it's a fixed vocabulary item and people don't think about working hard or wooing someone (um jdn. werben) nor the modern meaning "to advertise oneself".