Comment on Must be a strange feeling that something you used to use is now only seen in museums
spicytuna62@lemmy.world 5 days agoI knew about 5-digit dialing, but never knew people used to dial only 4 digits. That’s pretty neat, and probably made life with a rotary phone much easier than people my age realize.
I’m a younger millennial so it was no big deal to grab the landline and dial 1+10 digits to call my girlfriend long distance in 2009. On a rotary phone, it’d probably have taken til supper just to dial lol
I did find a rotary phone in a box at my great grandmother’s house once and played with it because it was fascinating to me. Then I dialed a random 800 number on it and remarked that it was kinda amazing that so many people bought things over the telephone in the day lol
foodandart@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Yup… the trick was having your LATA code be on the mechanical switcher. They could address 9,999 numbers. Which in a town that at the time had maybe 1,900 people… it was glorious.