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.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday December 24 2018, @02:54PM (1 child)
As long as you don't mind them sounding like a robot trying to fuck your ear.
I'll stick to my POTS desk phone, thank you very much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 24 2018, @10:26PM
Our POTS phones still work fine, but Verizon sent a letter a few months back that we will have fiber/Fios sometime in 2019...and the migration is mandatory, copper service being taken down. We'll probably go with the fiber to get it installed, but then compare prices with phone over tv-cable service. Working from home, I'm willing to pay for high quality voice connections.
One of the older restaurants in town (well over 100 year old building near a restored water-powered grain mill) has an old phone switch board in their front room that used to serve the town. Looks similar to the photo in the article of the magneto switch board. Pretty transparent technology--patch cords and phone jacks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Monday December 24 2018, @03:53PM (6 children)
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.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 24 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)
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)
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
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
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
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
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.
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(Score: 2) by slap on Monday December 24 2018, @05:03PM (1 child)
The phone in our bedroom connected to the house telephone line is an old rotary dial phone. We kept it because the house line was on copper, so the phone line was active even with the house power out. The rotary dial phone doesn't need house power for it to work - it uses the phone line power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 24 2018, @05:30PM
The days of the banks of batteries are long gone. As are continuous copper from Central offi e to premises. There is fiber in between and batteries on poles, but they do not last like the glass jar wet cells in the olden Co's.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Monday December 24 2018, @05:26PM
My grandparents were on the country 'party' phone system where YOUR calls had a certain ring to them and you were ONLY supposed to pick up the phone when it rang for you, but everyone listened on everyone else's conversations.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday December 24 2018, @05:31PM
Yeah, dial up sucked: i remember trying to download linux over dial up. Impossible until i found wget -c... could have kicked myself for not having found it sooner.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Monday December 24 2018, @09:16PM
I spoke with an old telephone technician and one of my favorite stories was when he had to tech out a strange problem nobody could figure out. One customer was calling his mother several times a day, but every so often his call was routed to a wrong destination. What he noticed was it the misdirected number was almost always 1 digit away from the dialed number. Looking further at the time, it was always at the hottest point in the day. He surprised the other techs in the room by telling them to go to a particular mechanical switch and replace out a single "switch" mechanism and that would solve the problem. During the day the heat was expanding the metal causing it to catch just a little during rotation, which then routed it incorrectly through the rest of the system by 1 digit.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hartree on Monday December 24 2018, @10:20PM
Might be a throwback for me, but nothing new. I spent years running field telephone switchboards in the Army and Guard. Technically, I was a radioteletype operator, but everyone layed field wire and pulled telephone switchboard shifts.
"Essex switch. Essex 53. One moment please."
Just make sure you do the ring forward, and not back into the person callings ear. Colonels don't like that. Ask me how I know. ;)