I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?
OMG. Why would they put a timer on it then?? That seems like it would take forever.
It did take forever. Rotary phones work by sending clicks down the phone line that automation equipment listens to. If clicks came too fast the equipment wouldn’t understand it correctly. This was one of the big improvements the touch tone phone brought: it was much faster to dial. Instead of clicks each button generated a tone at a specific frequency and the automated switching equipment could interpret it much faster. At least some of the early phones had a switch to make them send clicks instead, in case the local phone company didn’t support tones yet.
Oh WOAH. You just made me understand wtf is going on with the payphone in the scene at the beginning of War Games! He was making the clicks by hanging it up repeatedly. You just unlocked a memory of me and my dad, he loved that movie. That as well as what was going on in that scene! I can’t believe that scene came back to me right now and connected to what you were saying.
Apparently my brain wanted to know how that worked while my conscious brain didn’t really think about it much other than “huh.” At the time. My dad did make me watch it like five times though.