What is this

john in la · Jun 2, 2020

Saw this today.
50 cents for a local call.

Billy Shafer · Jun 2, 2020

Not many any more. Know how to operate one.

72supr · Jun 2, 2020

The good old days.

onefarmer · Jun 3, 2020

For when your girl is grounded from her cellphone. She has to supply her own quarters.

chuck machinist · Jun 3, 2020

As an operator in my youth, I would have to listen for the tone and tally the coins dropped. Funny how folks claimed they put the correct amount in! Just saying! CM

Bruce from Can. · Jun 3, 2020

Still a few around, most don’t take coins, you swipe a card

RobCons · Jun 3, 2020

Not many left around here. Did some work for a fellow once that owned several thousand across the south east. Cell phones put him out of business.

Gambles · Jun 3, 2020

If you really want some laughs, go to Youtube and watch the fun when kids are given a rotary phone and are asked to make a call.
Speaking of pay phones, quite a few years ago, I was reading an article in Reader's Digest about the McDonald's fast food restaurant chain.
Of course, this was before cell phone usage got to be big, but the article said that there were never any pay phones inside a McDonald's restaurant.
It was designed that way on purpose to keep out the "trash". Just a couple of days before reading the article, I had seen a working pay phone in a McDonald's in Kansas, so the writer of the article was not 100% accurate.

miangus · Jun 3, 2020

Back in the day that item made a lot of cash for Bell System companies. Toured the coin collection facility in Detroit in the 80's those dimes sure add up. That was still in the day of mechanical central offices, fascinating. Times change. I can remember when they opened up the pay phone system to non regulated companies. There was still a max tariff and we would take a couple roll of dimes and look for violators.

coshoo · Jun 3, 2020

My kid rode his bike about 5 miles to town one summer- it got hot and he was tired, so tried a pay phone to call me and ask to come pick him up. Put in his dime, operator came on and said it would be $2.50 to complete the local call. He decided to just ride home instead. There were some real coyotes out there after deregulation.

Hobo,NC · Jun 3, 2020

We devised ways to use them free, when out on a road call (tow) I would call the shop and have them ask for me and if they would pay the phone charge. If a No they knew I had delivered the car and headed back if a yes then I could get the order to pic up a tow on the way back are any supply's/pats needed.

Toward the end you had to have a phone card they would not take your money. You could still dial an operator free I used them several times for an emergency.

Mike(NEOhio) · Jun 3, 2020

Back in high school the lobby phone had the steel cable sheath broken and one of the wires was exposed. If you shorted that wire to the coin return button you got a dial tone. Don't recall if you could actually complete the call though.

farmallsandcoops · Jun 3, 2020

If anyone has been to the KFEC in Louisville (where National Farm Machinery show, North American International Livestock Exposition, etc. are held), in the early 1990s there were several "banks" of payphones in that complex. 10-15 in a row in each bank.

In the early 2000s, there was one phone left on each bank, if that.

Billy Shafer · Jun 3, 2020

When I first started generator work.They were still using the old relay controls. I did one building. That was four floors of relay sections. Then they came out with the circuit boards. Four floors became one. Sure left alot of empty space.

Ronnie Budd · Jun 3, 2020

(quoted from post at 16:50:51 06/03/20) When I first started generator work.They were still using the old relay controls. I did one building. That was four floors of relay sections. Then they came out with the circuit boards. Four floors became one. Sure left alot of empty space.

I was trained in the maintenance and operation of those electromechanical stepping switches. The first ones we had in the DCO were Strowger stepping switches. Each one had 10 vertical positions and 10 rotary positions and could service 100 lines. They required a lot of maintenance.

In time, they were replaced by Stromberg Carlson X-Y stepping switches. They were also 10X10, but in vertical and horizontal planes. They were a lot more reliable. Then the digital stuff starting coming in as rotary dial phones were being replaced by the new DTMF (push button) phones. There was a period of time where both types of switches were required since people were slow to adopt the DTMF phones.

T.R.K. · Jun 3, 2020

How old are you?

Ronnie Budd · Jun 5, 2020

(quoted from post at 02:29:29 06/04/20) How old are you?

If you are replying to me, I am 69, nearly 70. I was working on these things in 1970, in the Army Signal Corp. The military always had the latest innovations in communications, and had made the conversion to DTMF phones by the second half of the 1970s.

The Stowger stepping switches were still being used in a lot of smaller civilian DCOs in the 1980s. The exchange in my small hometown were still using them. We still had a party line at home well into the 90s.

What is this

john in la

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Billy Shafer

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72supr

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onefarmer

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chuck machinist

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Bruce from Can.

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RobCons

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Gambles

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miangus

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coshoo

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Hobo,NC

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Mike(NEOhio)

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farmallsandcoops

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Billy Shafer

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Ronnie Budd

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Ronnie Budd

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