Rotary phones
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Rotary phones gave birth to the concept that a phone was now extremely personal. Now, there was no need to ask the operator to connect you to another number. As each phone had its own identification number, reaching them just a matter of entering it in correct manner. The video directly to the left is an instructional video from the American Bell Telephone Company, explaining to customers how to use the Rotary Dial. To many of us, the rotary dial seems like an more of a game than a device. Most phones today, either touch screen or keypad, consist of a grid like set up. While the rotary phone consisted of a disk with ten holes, including the numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,&9. The standard dimensions of the rotary phone included a three inch in diameter disk and numbers ordered in one of four ways: 1-9 then 0, 0-9, 9-0, or 0 and then 9-1. (Casson, 185) Eventually, the 1-9 then 0 form was standardized. When dialing, a single pulse was sent out when the first number on the disk was dialed. Similarly, ten pulses were sent out when the last numbed was dialed, requiring that the order of numbers needed to be standardized.
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Back in the 'olden days' as I used to call them when I was a child, the letters on a rotary phone weren't used for texting. Rather, each telephone number originally began with two letters. The two letters were often the abbreviation of the city or even state that the telephone's owner resided in. (Casson,266) Today's area codes have nothing to do with the older abbreviation codes. As the popularity of telephones increased, the operating habits changed as well. Personally, I had never given a second thought to the relevance of having Letters on a non-mobile phone. I had always believed that they were there to help spell out the last four digits of a 1-800 number. For example, 1-800-SCI-ENCE would be punched in as 1-800-724-3623. Maybe in the next generation, children will believe it was some old kind of texting and ask 'Where's the screen?'
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