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New Cell Phone for Seniors

Damn whippersnappers! How are you supposed to stick your finger in them little holes. This is more like it.

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Chuck(G) said:
Damn whippersnappers! How are you supposed to stick your finger in them little holes. This is more like it.

6a00d83452989a69e2011168987a3f970c-800wi
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Just use a pencil, like a lot of people did for some reason.

I have a rotary dial app on my Android phone.

I'm still upset that John's Phone is out of production. I really liked the text message feature.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Damn whippersnappers! How are you supposed to stick your finger in them little holes.
Click to expand...

My granny had a gold plated rotary dial phone, when she passed in 2001, I got it and set it up for use at my house. A few of my friends at the time wanted to call someone and I'd direct them to use the rotary phone, they'd pick up the receiver and stare at the rotor dumbfoundedly. Eventually they'd try to push their fingers in the holes like they were buttons and get impatient when they didn't hear anything but a dial tone, then get angry when I started rolling over laughing. I'd then dial the number for them while they complained "that's not how phones are supposed to work!"

I'd still be using it today, but our POTS service degraded when Verizon took over GTE. We got fed up with constantly calling them out to fix the crossed lines. If you called anyone on our street, you had 1 in 23 chance of actually getting the house you called. The rest of the time, it'd often connect to multiple houses at the same time and everyone would be confused to why they were on a party line (which is another thing youngins don't know about.)
 
GiGaBiTe said:
I'd still be using it today, but our POTS service degraded when Verizon took over GTE. We got fed up with constantly calling them out to fix the crossed lines. If you called anyone on our street, you had 1 in 23 chance of actually getting the house you called. The rest of the time, it'd often connect to multiple houses at the same time and everyone would be confused to why they were on a party line (which is another thing youngins don't know about.)
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I've been meaning to try my rotary phones on my Obi VOIP box. I don't know how to rotary-dial star or pound ("octothorpe" in Bell official jargon) with one though. The ones in my shop and garage are original equipment from when the house was built.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've been meaning to try my rotary phones on my Obi VOIP box. I don't know how to rotary-dial star or pound ("octothorpe" in Bell official jargon) with one though. The ones in my shop and garage are original equipment from when the house was built.
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When dialing special service codes, 11 is equivalent to * ("star"). For example, instead of *69, you can dial 1169.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've been meaning to try my rotary phones on my Obi VOIP box. I don't know how to rotary-dial star or pound ("octothorpe" in Bell official jargon) with one though. The ones in my shop and garage are original equipment from when the house was built.
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Octatherpe.
 
Darn, the wall phones have a special modular connector that's recessed to mate with the old Bell wall plates. I can't figure how to get an ordinary cable to mate with it--all of my RJ14 F-F adapters are too wide. So the experiment's going to be delayed.
 
KC9UDX said:
I can still pulse dial a phone with only a hook.
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back in the day, we used to do that to bypass those little locks that went through one hole of the dial.

Edited to add: thinking about it, that was probably good junior practice for Morse keying.
 
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Chuck(G) said:
Accepted spelling seems to be Octothorpe. One story has it named in honor of Jim Thorpe, but I think that's a shaggy-dog story.

Anyway, it's not "number sign" or "pound sign" or "hash tag"....
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Things keep changing. I have a book somewhere here that describes the spelling in detail. I'll have to remember to find it. The book says it was spelled Octatherpe to make sure that the word didn't have any possible etymology, and to make sure Europeans would have a hard time pronouncing it.
 
roberttx said:
back in the day, we used to do that to bypass those little locks that went through one hole of the dial.

Edited to add: thinking about it, that was probably good junior practice for Morse keying.
Click to expand...

It came in handy once. I was a big hero for five minutes once.

I was at someone else's house when the power went out. They wanted to call the power company, but all their phones had wall warts. Except one: it was built into a fax machine. It worked, but the dialing buttons did not because they were part of the fax machine.

I used it to dial the power company. The homeowner talked to them and they barked at him that they already had a bunch of calls about it.
 
Here's a 2-parter on the crosshatch. Lots of alternative theories about its origin. What's curious is that one source has the "th" in the word to make it difficult for Europeans to pronounce correctly.

In this 1973 patent filing, it's called "octothorp" and the asterisk is called "sextile", a coinage which apparently never took hold.

Personally, I think the naming was a Communist plot to corrupt the minds of the young.
 
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