Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go “Wow, that was… wild.”
Today’s topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it’s not the only game in town, it’s an entirely different thing now.
(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)
for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability– and you didn’t– you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)
Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing “*69”. There’s no way that was an accident.
If you moved, unless it was in the same city– and in larger cities, the same PART of the city– you had to change phone numbers.
As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say “Guess what? You have a new area code now.”
The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive… but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.
Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.
The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.
For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.
All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).
Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.
Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with “A”, and “Aardvark” was a popular name.
Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.
One phone line per family was the norm.
Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.
A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn’t realize who they were talking to.
And of course, there were the times where you couldn’t leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.
Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven’t gone away, but who pays them?)
Since you can’t do secondary bullet points, I’ll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.
these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.
The first generation of consumer answering machines didn’t reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.
due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.
they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.
Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.
Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.
Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn’t get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going– thus recording some or all of the phone call.
Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn’t figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn’t know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend’s machine– and her current boyfriend’s– and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.
And, of course, there’s the nightmare that was long-distance.
Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.
This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.
Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper– with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.
Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.
At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.
“Would you like to change your long distance plan” was the 80’s and 90’s equivalent of “We have important news about your car insurance.”
Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.
Next tell them about calling “collect” and the commercials it spawned in the 90s.
Oh, right.
If you needed to call someone from a payphone and didn’t have the quarter, or you needed to call someone long distance and not pay for it yourself, you could place a collect call. Originally, this meant talking to the operator, who would call the person, ask if they would accept the charges on THEIR bill, and if they did, put the call through.
Eventually, this got automated– you’d call a number, punch in the number you wanted to dial, and record your name, and a computer would call the other person.
Charges for a collect call were higher than if you paid them directly.
Even before this was automated, people had ways of getting around the charges– “If I give my name as ‘Charlie’ it means I arrived okay, but if I give my name as 'Chuck’, decline the charges and call me back.” Once it was automated, you could actually give a two-second message.
Oh, yeah, and payphones. Until the early aughts, there were phones everywhere that you could put in coins and make a phone call. The phrase “It’s your dime” is left over from when it cost ten cents, and continued well into the age where the call cost a quarter. (In that age, we developed “Here’s a quarter. Call someone who cares.”)
Payphones were everywhere and completely unmonitored, making them the method of choice for lots of illegal or just annoying activities, since you could trace the call to the phone and still have no idea who placed the call.
Originally, payphones were enclosed in a booth for privacy, but between the fact that these booths got used for non-phone activities– sex, drugs, changing into superhero costumes*– and the fact that, with such privacy, people would tie up the payphone for extended periods of times, the concept of the “phone booth” got redefined to what we would call a kiosk today.
*this was a staple of Superman comics. I can’t remember which movie it was, but there was a scene where Clark pulled at his tie then suddenly realized it was a MODERN phone booth– a kiosk– and that wouldn’t work.
Landlines were household numbers, not individual numbers the way cellphones are. (occasionally a teen might have their own line but this was rare)
Kids were expected to be able to answer the household phone reasonably politely from a young age.
As a kid, I got drilled on “I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?” to obscure the difference between Mom is busy, Mom is in the bathroom, and I am home alone and thus at risk.
Managing the long curly phone cord took skill. If you stretched it around a corner, it would sweep things off tables. The spiral would invert in places, making it look ugly and move less predictably.
Kids were expected to memorize their home phone number from a fairly early age. (not as much to call themselves as to tell an adult if they got lost or otherwise needed help)
You could have an unlisted (not in the phone book) number in most places. Single women sometimes put their first initial instead of their first name.
Schools sometimes made phone trees for efficient spreading of information like snow days (for schools too small to have that information on the radio). They were written-out paper trees where one person would call the next two or three, and each of them would call the next two, and so on.
Babysitters were sometimes left with the number of the restaurant the parents would be at, for emergencies.
And all of this is for later landlines, from the 60s-90s. Before then, things were different!
Party lines. The first several decades of phones being common, they did not have a single dedicated phone line to each individual house, because that would have been too expensive. Instead, there was a single phone line that went to every house on the street. Every house had a different ring pattern so you could tell which house was being called, but anybody who misheard it (or was nosy) could pick up their phone and listen to anybody else’s phone conversations any time they wanted to. There was usually a slight click sound as they picked it up, but you might not be able to tell. This was another reason for using phone booths for any sensitive conversation.
Calls were connected by a living person (almost always a woman). You told the operator who you wanted to call (which might be a name, and might be a word+number, like “Pensylvannia 6-5000” of the famous song) and they would physically plug in a cable to the phone line you wanted to reach. There were automatic switching machines starting in the 1880s, but most places didn’t have them until fairly late–the last manual switchboard in the UK wasn’t replaced with a mechanical one until 1960. And even if your area had automated calls for local numbers, a long-distance call would require an operator. On early phones, you got the operator by picking up the phone; once you had an automatic switching machine, you had to dial zero, but there was always an operator on duty and easy to reach.
Operators, redux. A large apartment building or office building might have separate lines for each apartment or major office. But they didn’t have separate phone numbers for all of those different extensions! Instead, they would have an operator for the building whose job was to connect people. This led to answering services. If a person lived in such a building, they could pay to have the operator take messages for them when they weren’t home.
Monopoly. Pretty much all telephone lines in a country would be owned by a single company, in the US it was AT&T, sometimes called “Ma Bell,” because it had originally been called the Bell Telephone Company. AT&T was forced to de-monopolize in 1982, leading to the development of competing phone companies.
Billing. Local calls were included as part of your monthly bill, but long-distance calls were billed as separate line items, so you could look at your bill and tell every single long-distance call from your phone that month. And it added up, so people did look a lot of letter-writing. You’d call long-distance for an emergency or big news, but people rarely called long-distance just to talk. Instead, they would write letters.
International calls. International calls were crazy expensive.
For quite a good run of time there, the phone lines were their own distinct thing, which ran along the same poles as the power. So quite often, the power to your house would go out, but your landline could still make calls. You could in fact call the power company about the outage.
A lot of that wiring is still physically there afaik, but modern landlines are VOIP and generally run through your modem, so when you lose power you also lose phone, which has definitely given cell phones a clear utility boost.
You can see the characters in the Andy Griffith show using the Party Line to eavesdrop on their neighbors conversations, and everyone there was aware that their neighbors might be listening in. Most were okay with it, but if it was something very private or important they would specifically tell anybody else on the line to hang up. They anticipated their neighbors being nosy and not announcing that they’d joined the call.
The neighbors could eavesdrop on each other without getting caught by putting their finger on the receiver before raising the phone off of it, and then slowly releasing it afterwards. This prevented the other people on the line from hearing the telltale click of them picking up the phone. In order to remain stealthy they would have to carefully and slowly lower the phone back down when hanging up as well.
I just wanted to add stuff I remembered.
when I was a kid (the 90s mostly) I wasn’t allowed to leave a certain defined area around my home without enough change to use a pay phone. we never did the collect call scam like a lot of people are talking about, though I knew people who did. this was true of a lot of kids- usually you had a quarter or two in your pocket, if you were going too far from home, in the 90s.
I remember being incensed about the price for the pay phone going up from a quarter. (I think it went up to 35 cents, I was outraged)
beepers (aka pagers) were a thing where you could call a number, put a phone number or code in, and it would show up on the beeper screen. a lot of people wore them on their belts. my mom was disabled and stayed at home, she had special codes to send to Dad’s beeper to let him know if she was leaving the house and when she was home (she was disabled and on heavy medication for years, he actually did need to be able to tell if she was out, or at home and not answering the phone- she passed out in the kitchen a couple of times). mostly they were in use in the 80s to 90s, but some places still use them (they’re popular at hospitals).
the internet ran off land line (I think this is common knowledge but idk anymore) and you could knock someone off the internet by picking up the phone. we actually had a second land line to our house that was dedicated to the modem for this exact reason. It was probably very expensive to install. I have no idea, I was, like, 9 when we moved into that place.
when we switched to I think cable internet? or dsl? whichever, after that, I had my own phone number in my room when that was still a cool thing for a teenager to have. (I was the least cool teenager imaginable) it was so cool because it meant you could have your own private conversations and be a lot more sure they were private. I used this to have the dorkiest conversations possible because, as I’ve said, I was the least cool teenager imaginable.
phones had actual bells in them, for a long time. they ring because they used to have actual bells that were rung when a call went through. I don’t know when this stopped happening, presumably the 80s? but, anyway, if you weren’t sure about that terminology, now you know. literal actual bells.
(I found a diagram that called them gongs? maybe there’s a technical difference, but gongs are also rung)
phones used to be stupid heavy. I remember the first time I used my grandma’s cordless phone I was shocked by how light it was, and we had a fairly slim handset at home. if you ever see someone hit someone in the face with a phone in older action movies, that was genuinely heavy enough to be used as a blunt weapon (and probably could still make the call afterwards, old rotary phones were fucking tanks)
