Call anywhere in the lower 48, just not from here. Phone is gone! 😆 Most of them are gone now. Pay phones haven't worked well for the last ten years anyway. Public phones used to come in booths with a fan and lighting, and sometimes a urine smell. Then there was the "phone from car" which was a public phone with an extra long cord so you could sit in your car with the receiver. Then came those newfangled cell phones.
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Fuenteovejuna did it 
Hahahahaha! I CAN DO THAT WITH MY CELL! I have to admit, I miss those lil' booths.
At least with a cell phone, the ear goobers on the receiver are usually your own. :p In the heyday of pay phones, it was common to carry a hanky, tissues, or paper towels in the pocket to wrap around the earpiece. Even so, it was impossible to stop the drift of whore perfume that often came out of them.
Heh. Payphones where always a pain in the behind in Romania. Forget finding a clean one, it was hard enough to find a working phone! My parents waited 17 years to get a landline, and then 5 years later I got my first cellphone. Now the house is overwhelmed with them; at some point there were two land lines and three mobiles. History has such a sense of irony…
Originally posted by claudeb:
It reminds me of my first time in Mexico in 1980. A collect call back to the USA usually involved waiting a good part of the afternoon in a long-distance telephone center. Theoretically these calls could be made from public phones, but no person could stand there that long waiting for the operator, plus other people waiting for the phone would probably get rather angry. The real heartbreak was waiting an hour or more for your call and the damned line was busy.Later, seemingly overnight, internet was all over Mexico. Choose from landline, VoIP calls from a net cafe (very cheap!), or roam with your cell phone from back home. TelMex refused to wire a neighborhood for years where a friend of mine lives. Now he has high-speed cable net and VoIP.I love telephone/communications trivia and stories. I'll probably do more on it later.
My grandpa used to own a local payphone company that had 200-300 phones in the greater tri-county area. It was pretty successful. Then, the cellphone came about and killed it. DUN DUN DUN. He's OK though lol.
My high school must have had one of the last old-style pay phones like you would see in movies from the 50's. I dropped by the school once in 1980 and it was still there, lol. You'd drop the coins in and they would bounce off bells inside and make noises like "ding-ding-dong" which would activate phone company equipment to allow the call to be placed. It was rumored that recordings of the coins hitting the internal balls could be played on a tape recorder to gain free long-distance calls.One of the greatest stories of phone system "exploration", AKA "phone phreaking", is that of John Draper, AKA Captain Crunch. He learned how to manipulate AT&T long-distance phone lines by the use of a 2600 hertz signaling tone, which was the exact frequency emitted by a toy whistle in a box of Captain Crunch cereal at that time.There are so many parallels with Mr. Crunch and the more recent Internet. 😀 Other interesting personalities of this type:Kevin Mitnick.Kevin Poulsen.Manipulation of the phone system apparently still goes on today. Supposedly the mob is pretty much in control of the phone switches in the Las Vegas area, and when people call for certain types of "special" services in that area, the odds of actually getting the number you dialed can be quite low. The local telephone provider in that area has admitted on occasion that they have lost control of the system.Man, I could go on forever.
I wonder if there is a graveyard for old phone booths, like there is for planes and trains. Never could stand using a phone booth because of the smell and there always seemed to be something stuck on the mouthpiece. :yuck: Thinking back about 50 years ago, Mountain Bell was the ONLY phone company. We had party lines too where you shared the line. If the call was for you, it would only ring at your house, but if whoever you shared the line with happened to pick up their phone to use it, they would often just sit there and listen. You always knew they were there because they didn't hang up and you could hear them breathing.
Oh yes! That's so true.
Originally posted by PainterWoman:
I've been by that airplane graveyard/storage area in Arizona. I could see a lot of old jets still painted for Eastern Airlines. I thought they were really pretty.My parents often talked of party lines, but I've never used one. I have lived in places where we had a service called "Ringmaster" where a single line would be assigned several phone numbers, each with a distinctive ring, so you'd know who the call was for without getting off your ass, lol.For years the phone company here was Southern Bell. I always thought "Southern Belle" would have been a cuter name.Originally posted by hungryghost:
You may even remember that for special events the phone company would tow in trailers that had pay phones mounted all around the outside of them.
oooh…I remember when there used to be banks of payphones on street corners, in airports, bus stations and the like.. 😦
Originally posted by hungryghost:
There is a beautiful scene in the novel Neuromancer, where the protagonist walks along a long bank of payphones, and each of them rings in turn as he goes by. The future looked quite different in 1984.
There was a time that I thought that every pay phone had a camera trained on it from nearby. Now I think that would have been pretty crude as there may now be the capacity to store every call ever made. I think I have read too much sci-fi. 😀 On the other hand, if you buy stamps from the machine at the post office, it snaps your picture. Proponents of the system says it's to prevent credit card fraud. I'm not so sure because it's only an $8 transaction and I can use my credit card in so many other places without a photo session.AT&T, after all, was revealed to have a secret room in the San Francisco data center where a major west-coast data cable was split with a prism, and nobody knows where the diverted data goes. Supposedly the data mining is outsourced to a private company in Israel. Very comforting!I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy nutjob. 😆
Nah, it's only natural to worry. But no control is possible, and once your data is out there, it can be copied indefinitely with zero effort. All we can do is learn to live in this new world technology has created.