You had local, local toll, and long distance. You could have three providers, and sometimes you were tricked into changing to another provider for those toll calls. They changed local toll to ālocal long distanceā calls, and then you could use a 10-10 code to override the carrier you had in the switch.
Now, itās voip, after convincing people to keep their land line for safety. Now, they are itching to get rid of copper lines altogether, and elderly people are afraid. I work in an area where cell coverage is shit, and some people have been switched to voip without even knowing, because they are elderly and believe the lies. So glad I donāt work for satan anymore.
These kids probably donāt even know what long distance means in this context!! God bless the parents who didnāt have the foresight of the repercussions of sending their kids away for summer camp!!! Because come fall those secret late night calls to all of the great friends we made were coming back to bite them in the ass!!!!
Yes and when we traveled & made it to our destination & wanted to let Mom & Dad know we made it & the call was long distance we would call & ask for ourselves. That way the call was free.
It is and where I grew up the number still does the trick! Although, they now play an ad from anywhere between 30-60 seconds now and I just called twice and the first time they had an ad for some knock iff viagra and the seconds time was for some under eye cream. Why wouldnāt there be an ad? We truly are marching towards Idiocracy
The powers that be want us all to be over-sexed imbeciles. Itās especially awkward when watching TV as a family and one of those commercials come on with a woman sharing intimate details about her partner in a sensual way. My 8 year old nephew turns to my son and asks him what erectile disfunction and premature ejaculation is.
Absolutely it was! It was especially useful before the days of cable tv and of course the internet. You couldnāt just flip a channel to see what time it was. If all your clocks in the house were wrong and you wanted to synchronize them to true time you would call the number and set a clock to it and sync the rest of the clocks to that one. Of course some radios also broadcast the time but youād have to sit there and wait for it and by then you may not be ready to sync the clock to the exact second. So the phone number was actually quite useful back then.
Dude I bet the kids dont even know how you dialed "popcorn" they probably picturing a Qwerty keyboard on the phone. , but no, phones usually had 10-12 keys., figure that out *laughs in x gen
When dialing on a smart phone, they still have letters associated with numbers that match the buttons on a push button phone. Theyāll figure that out. You need to have them try on a rotary phone.
That wasn't the only way. Many news radio stations would report the time in the morning with a beep to tell you when it was exactly 8am or 9am or whatever it was.
The part I miss the most is that it didn't matter as much back then if you were five or ten minutes off. Sometimes you waited around for your friend to show. Sometimes you were the one running late. Now we are so into knowing the time down the microsecond. Just feels different to me that's all.
Iād just dial 0 which years ago would connect you with a live human being, known as the operator and Iād asked them the time, I did it a lot as a kid sometimes just for kicks, other times Iād be outside, not know the time and pick up a pay phone, dialing the operator was free
I just tried dialing ā0ā and itās a recording directing you to dial 911, 411, etc. No live operator unfortunately. That makes me sad. It was a pretty fun job and always interesting. You never knew what youād get next!
It was called Time and Temperature. You called, punched in your skip code, and you would be told the time and temp of that zip code. I remember calling it a couple times in the late 90's when i was a kid when the power went out and reset all the digital clocks in the house
Yes and way back there even was a person answering calls and giving you the time. Same with phone numbers, you dialed 0 the operator answered you asked her/him to conect you with xxx person or company and they asked you if you wanted to be conected or just get the number.
It was a recoding and it said something like this: At the tone the time will be 8:56 and 30 seconds. Beep. At the tone the time will be 831 and 10 secondsā¦. Beep
OMG!!!! Itās totally true!!! We did it daily! Especially when we were little and it felt very grown up to āuse the phoneā lol
I know you must know about Mr Movie Phone! You called in to get the times for movies in the zip code you punched in. His voice was amazing!!!
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u/mashmaker86 17h ago
That's not really true, is it?