It made a sound like when Uncle Fester put a light bulb in his mouth
The demonstrator is a rather striking-looking woman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p45T7U5oi9Q&t=632s
That sound is annoying. Who would want to hear that each time they picked up a phone? I understand why they changed it.
shareWow! That is a really harsh racket, it sounds like the Mining Ship Nostromo about to self-destruct with Ripley still onboard!
shareI remember the dial tone to have a bit of a lower tone, making it less annoying. I might even say it could be somewhat soothing? Lol. Definitely not as bad as the dial-up modems!
shareI grew up with this tone.
https://youtu.be/LEn2MmwBF7o
And I remember that my Music teacher in High School told me that it was an A!
Wasn't familiar with the European dial tone...we all know the double European ring tone from movies! Ring Ring!
shareI've seen French and English movies where cop cars sound like 'WEE OOH WEE OOH WEE OOH'
I like that sound but that English dial tone is very annoying
All dial tones should just be a purring cat, that's a much nicer sound than any of the others
Forgive me, but only a pussy would want that.
shareOh c'mon, I'm not lion!
shareSirens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ03h1b3N8c
Man, Seinfeld covered every possible situation during it's run and you are exactly The Man to find the YT clips!
That's from The Smog Strangler episodes😂
This is the one I'm used to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbItYOd0DX4
I'm sure it was different when I was a kid, but I don't remember it. Oh, I do remember way back when we'd pick up the phone to call someone and the operator said, "number please." We didn't have a dial on the phone then. I don't recall when that changed, but I'll never forget are phone number at the time: HOpkins 9-2598. That's the way you wrote it, with the first two letters capitalized. Those letters corresponded to the numbers on the dial. I suspect it was a holdover from when you'd tell the operator, "MOntrose 7-6185" or whatever. I don't recall when that names went away and everything was offered as all numbers.
That's the dial tone I remember. We had a rotary phone--I assume the kind of phone you mention was phased out in NYC by the time I was old enough to remember--mid 1960s. But I absolutely do recall named phone exchanges. Our number was ACademy 2-xxxx. That's 222-xxxx. I don't remember when that became obsolete, certainly by the mid-1970s.
In the small town my grandparents lived in, you didn't need to use the first two digits of the seven-digit number if the call was local. Using your example, all they needed to dial was 9-2598 to talk to someone in town. It was this way up until at least the late 1970s or early 1980s.
On a related topic, when my grandparents still lived on a farm outside of the town, they didn't have a street address, only a rural route number. To send them a letter you simply addressed it like this:
[NAME]
Route 2
[Town Name], [State] [Zip Code]
I believe it was the late 1980s or early 1990s when it was decided the properties should be numbered and the streets (often nothing but two-lane gravel roads) be numbered or named. So now the letters had to be addressed like this:
[NAME]
999 260th Street
[Town Name], [State] [Zip Code]
This was supposedly done to aid 911 responders.
> On a related topic, when my grandparents still lived on a farm outside of the town, they didn't have a street address, only a rural route number.
Here in rural Appalachia, we still have some odd addresses. Let's say that way back in the old days before automobiles, Harry Green owned a big plot of land, and there was a dirt path from the main road to his farm. And, let's say that Harry had picked up the nickname "Casey" somewhere along his years. Not surprisingly, the locals would call that dirt path "Casey Green's road." Now, it's 125 years later, the dirt path is now a paved street, there's no farm anymore but instead residential lots, nobody named Green lives in the area ... but the street is still called Casey Green Road.
That's interesting and amazing someone still knows the origin of the name. The town my grandparents lived in is named after an ancestor. When the railroad was constructed, the tracks ran right along the border of two neighboring farms. When it came time to build the train station it meant one of the landowners would lose a piece of their property. My ancestor was the one who agreed to cede a piece of his land, so the stop was named after him and the town which grew up around it came to bear the same name. At least that's how my grandmother explained it.
shareSame. but that clip in the original post was made over thirty years before I was born.
Funny, that habit of giving the first 2 initials of the location and then the rest of the number stuck around for ages
I remember mom telling me a number in Yonkers was YO5-1234 and it took me ages to figure out where that habit came from
I wonder if the switchboard girls were actually nosy like they were in the movies and listened in on all the area gossip😃
Who's stepping out on the spouse, who's ripping off the company, where the body is buried, etc...LOL
Back when my mum was a kid, the lady next door to her house was in charge of the local switchboard.
Grandma was indeed afraid that the operator girls would listen to her telephone conversations.
When I was little we had a “party line”; I hated that because when you tried to call someone, if the neighbor was using their phone we couldn’t call out. Or if you were waiting for an important call, your caller was getting a busy signal.
I remember hearing mom telling their kids to hang up and stop listening in on her calls.
We finally got a private line when I was in third or fourth grade. My parents were ecstatic.
I remember a party line from a summer vacation in a rural part of Colorado around 1970. Totally obsolete today.
shareI missed the old days of being able to prank call someone without having to worry about call display.
shareYah...requires special equipment or software today, but I'm too old for it to matter
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dr.+phil+prank+call
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=judge+judy+prank+call
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaYxZUiB-CA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlIPx6MYE-U
🤣
The first one is comedian Wanda Sykes. I've heard it before, it is one of the best.
EDIT Never mind it says so in the description. Maybe the description was edited. IIRC for some time it was a mystery who the woman was.
"EDIT Never mind it says so in the description. "
Yes, but it's so damn funny!