Queen makes first trunk call

50 year anniversary

[aspdaddy]

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

How thinks have changed, hard to imagine what phones will be like 50 years from now. I bet most people here cant even remember having to dial numbers :)

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

How things have changed indeed and re 50 years from now, I find it hard to imagine what else you can do with a phone?

[LifeinAsia]

I bet most people here cant even remember having to dial numbers :)

Hey- I do. I remember thinking how unfair it was having to compete with people with those fancy new push button phones when radio stations had call-in contests (i.e., be the 22nd caller when you hear a certain song).

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

It was a really scintillating conversation, eh?

[Rugles]

Hey- I do. I remember thinking how unfair it was having to compete with people with those fancy new push button phones when radio stations had call-in contests (i.e., be the 22nd caller when you hear a certain song).

YES! I remember having that problem. Then the "redial" function was the next innovation in fast dialing contests.

[piatkow]

I bet most people here cant even remember having to dial numbers

I had to phone my daughter today and discovered that I had left my mobile at home. I had never needed to memorise her number and had stopped writing numbers down in my Filofax (which still lives in my briefcase but is hardly ever used)

[londrum]

my young niece made me think about a similar thing the other day. i was holding a camera -- one of the normal old ones with a roll of film in, and she was wondering why it didn't have a viewscreen on the back. ... the only cameras she's ever seen in her entire life are digital ones with viewscreens. boy did that make me feel old.

[Essex_boy]

Hmm I laughed when I saw this in teh papaer, just think global calls with pictures are common place now.

[anallawalla]

I remember as a wee lad when we had to book a trunk call or an international call. The operator would call you at the requested time.

In the early 1980s, one could buy drop-in push-button dials for the rotary dial phones we had in the UK, Oz and NZ. These merely generated the pulses for pulse dial and were not faster. In NZ the phone numbers went in reverse sequence to the rest of the world except for the zero, which was in the same place. So the emergency number in NZ was 111 and not 999.

When tone dialling was introduced, radio contestants would try to find a phone with a demon dialler, which rattled off the tones rapidly and keep redialling until you got through.

[lawman]

Anyone remember party lines - it's different than it sounds. :)

[buckworks]

I was on a party line for a while in the 80s, when we lived in the country.

[dibbern2]

Anyone remember party lines - it's different than it sounds. :)

Yes! And do you remember all the special procedures for calling someone on your 'oarty'?

[edited by: lawman at 12:15 am (utc) on Dec. 18, 2008]
[edit reason] Fix Style Code [/edit]

[lawman]

I assume "oarty" is supposed to be "party". :)

I was pretty young and didn't know any of the parties.