Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday December 24 2018, @02:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the BR549 dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Try your hand at being an operator at the Roseville Telephone Museum

I don't know about you, but I marvel that, with a tiny device in my pocket, I can instantly hear the voice of any of my loved ones, any time, essentially for free.

Of course, this wasn't always the case. I'm old enough (nearly 37!) to remember when the phone would ring from overseas relatives and my parents would remind us to hurry to the phone: IT'S LONG DISTANCE! And yes, my parents used to pick up the phone and disrupt my dial-up Internet escapades.

But our contemporary landscape, replete with theoretically smart handputers, has an amazing past that extends well beyond my lifetime.

So, if you want to be dazzled at a free museum located just outside Sacramento, may I present to you what might be the nerdiest and most obscure free museum in Northern California: the Roseville Telephone Museum. It claims to have "one of the most extensive collections of antique telephones and memorabilia in the nation."

[...] I was grateful for the docents who meandered about and were all too happy to not only answer all my dumb questions, but they were even enthusiastic about giving live demos of a more-than-century-old magneto switchboard.

Simply by plugging in a cable, an old phone just a few feet away would ring. There was even a mid-20th century automated mechanical switching box, which had replaced live human operators.

I could have spent hours in that little museum, but I'd arrived not too long before closing time. Maybe because I'd shown such interest in the museum, I was handed a large hardback volume from 1995: History of the Roseville Telephone Company. (I hadn't mentioned to anyone that I was a reporter, I swear!)

[...] Just bear in mind, the museum will next be open on Saturday, January 5, 2019, from 10am until 2pm. Mark your calendars.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Monday December 24 2018, @03:53PM (6 children)

    by donkeyhotay (2540) on Monday December 24 2018, @03:53PM (#778111)

    I'm old enough to remember, as a child, having to dial the operator to make a long distance phone call so I could talk to my grandparents. We didn't have direct-dial long distance until I was about eight.

    The goal in the past was to create ultra-reliable, ultra-clear phone calls. In fact, the long distance carriers frequently competed on the quality of their calls. The quality was so good that you could be talking to someone half a world away and it would sound like they were right in the next room.

    But with cell phones we have traded quality for convenience. Yes, we can make calls from (almost) anywhere. But if the signal strength is spotty, as it is from my house - even with wifi, there are lots of dropped calls. Something that was unheard of with the old POTS. I've even considered re-installing a land line at my house for the singular purpose of having un-interrupted phone conversations with my daughter, but the expense is ridiculous.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 24 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday December 24 2018, @04:40PM (#778122) Journal

    Now we don't have to remember phone numbers.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday December 25 2018, @12:23AM (1 child)

      by looorg (578) on Tuesday December 25 2018, @12:23AM (#778216)

      I do wonder sometimes what this has done to people, or if it has had any effect. But I used to remember like all the phone numbers to my friends, my parents workplaces, my sisters when they moved away from home etc. Now I can sometimes barely even remember my own number. Perhaps we have just trades away "remembering" things for the convenience of "oh I'll just look that up when I need it ... over and over and over again"

      The thing that I don't miss with the old time phone numbers and such was the pricing structure, several bucks a minute just to call the next town over. Making a call overseas was bound to leave a dent in the phone bill.

      • (Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday December 26 2018, @02:46PM

        by donkeyhotay (2540) on Wednesday December 26 2018, @02:46PM (#778552)

        I learned today, watching some sort of bird nerd video on YouTube, that the chickadee's hippocampus actually expands during the fall, while it is gathering and hiding food stores that it will need during the winter. This allows the tiny bird to remember where it has stashed all of its "loot". In the spring, when food is plentiful, its brain shrinks back down.

        Now I wonder if the fact that we don't need to know as much is collectively causing our brains to shrink...

  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday December 24 2018, @09:05PM

    by edIII (791) on Monday December 24 2018, @09:05PM (#778170)

    You can blame the PSTN system for the bad quality. I'm surprised there was quality at one point as the whole system is limited to 8Khz sampling. What's particularly sad about it is that there are plenty of super high quality voice codecs that you can use with VoIP.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 2) by Slartibartfast on Tuesday December 25 2018, @08:06AM

    by Slartibartfast (5104) on Tuesday December 25 2018, @08:06AM (#778285)

    Yeah... no. Don't get me wrong: POTS has almost always had better quality than cell, but T1/packetization has been with us for well over 50 years, and the filters put in for digitization at the CO effectively killed both high- and low-frequency sounds. (Basically, they were optimized for voice.) THAT was effectively the start of exchanging quality for convenience, and was a de facto standard decades before cell service was "a thing." (Why, yes, I am -- or, at least, was -- a telecom engineer.)

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday December 26 2018, @02:53AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday December 26 2018, @02:53AM (#778470) Homepage

    The entire point is convenience not audio quality. I don't buy phone service to appreciate their audio fidelity, I buy phone service so I can communicate with other people as conveniently as possible.

    That's partly why textual chat took off and replaced a significant portion of phone calls. It's more convenient, and it turns out people didn't care much for hearing every rasp of their friends' breathing.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!