Familiar To Antique

Posted by Richard on July 24, 2024

Think about how many iterations of the telephone we have used in our lifetimes.

Rotary phones were the most common device for decades, and until 2006, 750,000 people still had one. Then came the button phone (Touch-Tone), introduced in 1963, updated in 1968 to include those curious extra digits of * and #. But it took until the 1980s for the button phone to become really popular. By, the 1990s nearly everyone had a button phone, even though they still incurred an extra charge.
The Trimline phone, introduced in 1965, was very space age, with the illuminated rotary dial (and later the buttons) in the handset itself. Interestingly, this same concept carried to over to today’s mobile phones.

In the past, phone service required the telephone man to come out to wire a phone. Occasionally we heard stories of the fabulously wealthy who had phones in their bathrooms — a true luxury in an age when people had to go to their phones and not the other way around.
For a long time, most people only had square desk phones — very durable and easy to use — or a wall phone (with a really long cord so you could do the dishes while chatting). But phones did evolve. You might remember (or even still use) the aptly named princess phone. Advertised as little, lovely and light, the princess phone was invented in 1959 and remained in production until 1994. Wal-Mart still advertises a version of one today.

Unlike today, for most of our lives, we didn’t actually own our home phones, and instead technically rented them from the phone company. You could move to a new house or apartment, but the phone stayed where it was. The phone might not have been yours, but it also didn’t cost much, unlike today’s sophisticated mobile devices that routinely retail for $1,000 or more. Only in 1976 did the FCC finally make it possible to own a phone — ushering an explosion of fancy and weird phones into the retail market. In 1983, AT&T began selling its phones instead of leasing them.

And now a vast majority of us have just our trusty cellphone which contains our contacts, calendars, photos, etc., etc., etc. Our entire lives.