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Hardware Hacking

Build Your Own Rotary-Dial Cell Phone 356

Posted by michael from the whis-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-whis-k-whis-k dept.
hwestiii writes "Yet another indicator of how unrepresentative of the main Slashdot crowd I am (meaning 'old') is that, like vinyl records, 8-track tapes, and Pintos, I can remember when rotary dial phones were items of everyday use, and not some object of retro-cool pseudo-nostalgia. Imagine my delight, then at finding this project in which an old rotary phone is turned into a cell phone. To give credit where its due, I originally found it linked from Hack A Day. I know nothing about home-built electronics projects, but this is enough to make me want to learn. If this catches on, imagine what they'll have to do to those 'turn off your cell phone' messages that play in movie theatres."
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Build Your Own Rotary-Dial Cell Phone More

Build Your Own Rotary-Dial Cell Phone

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  • What really makes me sad is the knowledge that many people today have never even seen a rotary phone, let alone used one.

    If, however, on the off chance you find yourself stranded in South English, Iowa, where the only pay phone in town is still rotary, this is how it works.

    Pick up the phone and wait for dialtone. Insert a dime. (Yes, this phone still costs a dime!) Now, see the holes arranged on the disc? Find the one corresponding to the digit you want to dial, insert your finger, and rotate the disc clockwise until you hit the stop. Remove your finger. Wait for the dial to rotate back to its original position. Repeat as needed.

    While you were dialing, did you hear those clicks? The circuit is actually being interrupted at a rate of 10 times per second. (This will be 20 times in some other countries.) The switching equipment in the central office measures the number of clicks and the time in between them to determine the number you dialed.

    For more information, I suggest reading old articles of Phrack [phrack.org].

    • Rotary Dialing - Reality (Score:5, Informative)

      by wcdw ( 179126 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:14PM (#11438346) Homepage
      10 times per what? Only if you're dialing a zero.

      As any old phone phreaker knows, one can dial any (land) phone - even today - by clicking the receiver. To dial a three, for example, one clicks the receiver three times (within a second).

      If you don't believe me, pick up your house phone and try it. This once was useful information, in the days of rotary phone locks, but now is just more useless trivia cluttering up my brain. ;)

      • Re:Rotary Dialing - Reality (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:39PM (#11438495) Homepage Journal
        10 times per what? Only if you're dialing a zero.
        Still, the dial turns at 10 clicks per second, even if doesn't turn for a full second. If you're driving at 25 miles an hour, it doesn't mean you driving for a full hour.
      • Depends on what's serving the line. Typical circuit-switching telco equipment like DMS-100, *ESS and so on will handle rotary pulses, but other devices that serve lines, like VG248 boxes and other VoIP equipment may not recognize dial pulses.

        Quite a few lines at work no longer pay attention to dial pulses, though I have yet to see one provided by Bellsouth that doesn't.

        -Z
      • Actually, if you ever find a phone that has no means of dialing at all, picking it up will probably make it autodial something. A single 'flash' of the hook switch will, more often than not, get you out of autodialing jail... need I say more?
      • He stuck it to the man big time. They gave him his phone call at the police station, but he gave them a bogus number. They put a metal plate over the keypad so he couldn't hack them.... OR SO THEY THOUGHT: He hung up and dialed his hacker buddy with the reciever. What a HACKER!

        I believe this character was modeled after Kevin Mitnick, who could negotiate modem connections and send data (ie. hack your planet) using only his mouth and a phone.
    • For those of you who are REALLY bored, you can pulse dial like a caveman on most analog land phones. You can generate those "click" pulses with the hook, or by rapidly opening and closing your line circuit some other way (a normally closed single pole switch on either red or green will do, or just tap a cut wire together if you are really lazy).

    • What really makes me sad is the knowledge that many people today have never even seen a rotary phone, let alone used one.

      It makes me sad when people feel superior for being older. Seriously. Have you ever used an abacus? Washed your clothes on a washboard?

      People not having used obscolete technology is called "progress" not "sad."
      • It makes me sad when people feel superior for being older. Seriously. Have you ever used an abacus? Washed your clothes on a washboard?

        I have both used an abacus and washed my clothes on a washboard. But I don't feel superior for being older. Instead, I feel ... er, older. Look at all this gray hair! Well, the women like it, so it can't be all bad...

        Anyhow, I've heard from actual /.ers who have related their confusion upon being confronted with a rotary telephone, so the post is entirely appropriate. You may have managed to go your entire life without running into any "obsolete" technology, but most of us don't work at Fry's.

        As for progress, don't get me wrong, I love progress. I have my nice Pentium 4 and my nice ThinkPad and my nice GSM phone and my nice DSL and my nice non-lame MP3 player with as much space as a Nomad. And yes, Touch-Tone was a massive improvement over rotary. I was just sad to see it go.

        I TTR

        • Re:What the hell kind of phone is THIS? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by lucmove ( 757341 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @11:28PM (#11438683) Journal
          About the sadness of seeing old rotaries disappear:

          I am not a single bit sad about the introduction of new technology. Very much on the contrary (I even have this /. account). I still remember very clearly how dialing a rotary was such a PITA.

          What really makes me sad, and I have found that many people agree with me, is the absolute lack of a notion of elegance and style of today's products. Everything really wants to look very "mawderrrrn-ish", future-ish, techie-ish. So what we get these days an awful fucking lot of gray/silver (or anything that makes sure it looks like metal) combined with those aggressive "johnny-too-slick" lines and contours. Most products today strive to look like those silly Matrix-Terminator-Blade Runner-inspired Macromedia Flash presentations (with metal-like looks AND metal-like sounds) or teenage Linux desktop screenshots submitted by kids called M0rpheus, D33struktor or L0rd ov da Ka0s.

          Under this pile of downright ugly designs, yes, many things from the 80s begin to look really cool. Or some kind of product version "for adults", at least. And don't even get me started on things from the 30s or the 60s, when the human factor was taken into a lot more consideration and the general taste en vogue was not so obsessively attached to technology and 21st-century space cowboys.

          BTW, I am only 32 years old.

        • Furthermore (Score:4, Informative)

          by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris...travers@@@gmail...com> on Friday January 21, 2005 @11:31PM (#11438692) Homepage Journal
          I have both used an abacus and washed my clothes on a washboard. But I don't feel superior for being older. Instead, I feel ... er, older. Look at all this gray hair! Well, the women like it, so it can't be all bad...

          I honestly think that they should teach at least college math students how to use an abacus and a slide rule. The reason is simple--- if you are really trying to learn *math* instead of *arythmatic,* these tools really help you get the feel of how the numbers actually work.

          BTW, I am in the under 30 crowd.

          I teach people how to use computers. And I *start* by going back to basic concepts. I start by explaining the really technical concepts in plain English like they did in the user manuals from the late 1980's. That way people have a fundamental sense of how things fit together and the computer is not so scary.

          Altogether too many things classified as "progress" are actually simply things which make us disconnected from the fundamentals of how things actually work.I do still find important uses for old technology. In particular the old telephones do a great job of explaining the various problems and solutions for two-wire voice traffic and are a whole lot more accessible intellectually than the newer ones.
      • Have you ever used an abacus?
        [snip]
        People not having used obscolete technology is called "progress" not "sad."

        How many modern gadgets do you have where you can teach a novice how it works? I mean in real detail. I mean the real fundamentals.

        Abacuses and sliderules were great and are still better than using calculators for teaching people math. Sure calculators are better than sliderules for doing arythmatic, but these are different issues.

        I don't like punchcards either, but I find them useful for demonstrating how binary information works as ones and zeros.

        And it is a whole lot easier to show someone how a telephone works using a rotary telephone built primarily out of wire-based circuits rather than the nice fancy IC-based systems we have today.

        Don't get me wrong. Using the new technology is usually faster/more efficient/more plesant than using the older technology, but it is FAR easier to learn a subject by studying the simpler usable systems of the past than it is by studying the cutting-edge.

        I am in the under-30 crowd. I saw my first punch-card when accompanying my grandmother to check the results of her computer programs (I was probably 3 the first time I remember seeing one). Yes, my grandmother could program a computer. Knowledge of what the punch-cards and readers actually looked like made it easy for me to understand the ideosyncracies of Fortran (which is what I think my grandmother used to program, given that she was an astrophysicist, but she had passed away by this point so I never got to ask).

        When I started studying telephony in order to impliment inexpensive solutions for my business, I started with the rotary telephone and worked my way forward. I know have a strong understanding of many aspects of telephony and my knowledge of the fundamentals would not have been as wasy to develop had it not been for studying the rotary phone.

        Progress is great, but it does isolate us from the fundamentals. To learn something well, you have to study the fundamentals. For that, often we want to look back to the simplest examples of working technology so that we can learn them.

        That is what this article is about, btw. It is about a bunch of people who find it interesting to *learn* something, helping others do the same by publishing cool little projects.

    • Fun with rotary dialing... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Hamster Lover ( 558288 ) * on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:36PM (#11438475) Journal
      Many years ago, probably the late 80's, I was at a restaurant in Vancouver waiting for a friend who appeared to be late. I was directed to the restaurant courtesy phone and was miffed when I discovered that the call from the restaurant to his home was long distance (Vancouver had some weird long distance rules back then, now fixed). Anyway, the courtesy phone had a long distance restrictor device attached so I pulsed dialed manually by clicking the receiver. All my tapping caused some curious looks from people in the restaurant waiting area, but it worked.

      I believe digital switches are much less tolerant and "manual" rotary dialing will no longer work now on digital circuits.
    • What really makes me sad is the knowledge that many people today have never even seen a rotary phone

      That is not sad at all. Rotary phones were transitory technology, like buggy whips and button hooks. What should make you more sad is that many people today don't know basic stuff, like how to "do" food and shelter from scratch. (Well, at least in most "first world" countries.)

      Beleive me, knowing how rotary phones work is waaaaaay down the list of skills I'd like folks stranded on an Island with me to h

    • Interesting facts about rotary and digital phones (Score:5, Informative)

      by Audacious ( 611811 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @11:16PM (#11438646) Homepage
      1. Rotary phones were built to last (unlike many digital phones). They can survive a drop from a two story building onto concrete. Just go down, pick it up, plug it in, and it will work.

      2. Rotary phones can withstand 300lbs of pressure before they will break or deform.

      3.Rotary phones can withstand temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees. This may seem a stretch, but rotary phones have been in buildings which have burnt to the ground and still worked.

      4. You do not need to be able to dial a rotary or digital phone. You just need to be able to push the button/hanger on the phone. As the original poster stated, the way in which rotary phones work (not cell phones mind you) is that they disconnect for a short period of time (like a 1/10 of a second) and then reconnect. What you might NOT know is that all digital land lines can be operated as a rotary phone too. So in an emergency, all you need to do is to tap the button/hanger on your phone's base with a slight pause between the dialing of the numbers. It will still connect. (So to call 1-411 would be one click, a slight pause, four clicks, pause, one click, pause, and one click. Try it sometime.) (I used to do this to dial out from the university on phones with a phone lock on them! ;-) )

      5. Digital phones sometimes have a switch on them to switch between rotary mode and digital mode. You can switch it to rotary mode, dial the number (and hear the antiquated clicks), and then switch back to digital mode to handle any of those "Press 1 to do Blah". I discovered this at my mom's house. She had rotary service (way out in the country!) but I'd dial the line, let the roatry part go through and then switch the phone over to digital mode to do things.

      6. Digital phones can be dialed by whistling into them. It isn't easy but you can do it if you practice long enough (and are bored enough).

      7. One of the last interesting things to know is that if you are ever, ever stranded somewhere with a broken phone and you need help, you can still use the phone line and dial the phone. All you need is to bare some of the wire and you have a telegraph. Hold the two wires together to complete the circuit and then use the two wires just like you would the button/hanger. Take them apart and you break the connection. Hold them together and you've got a connection. Operators are probably not as smart as they used to be about this (since telegraphs are not so common place anymore) but it used to be that you could do the old SOS and they would send someone. However, if you dial 911 using the above method and twist the two wires together afterwards the police will come out to investigate.

      Just a bit of FYI stuff. :-)
      • Regarding your #7--Does this mean if you just tap your receiver hook in an SOS pattern, you might get a visit from your phone company?

      • Re:Interesting facts about rotary and digital phon (Score:4, Interesting)

        by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Saturday January 22, 2005 @12:11AM (#11438833) Homepage
        I find this to be an interesting comment, because non-rotary phones are *NOT* digital. They (well, in North America) are DTMF, meaning they work with two tones played at once to signal the button press. This is all calculated by having one frequency for each row, and another for each column. When you press a button, the row and column tones are played, making the indicated dual tone. As such, you cannot dial a DTMF phone by whistling, unless you are capable of whistling two notes at the same time.

        One other interesting bit of trivia is that DTMF phones can have a fourth column of buttons A, B, C, and D. However, these typically would only be found on test sets and AUTOVON (US Military) phone systems.
      • TouchTone is NOT digital -- it's an analog dialing system, in fact, the only analog telephone dialing system of which I can think.

        Actually, there are three ways to dial digitally with plain old landline telephone service:

        *The pulse switch that most phones have
        *Tapping very quickly
        And you guessed it, since pulse dialing is digital,
        *A rotary dial.

        Which shows you that progress isn't always digital -- the whole advantage of TouchTone is that it uses sounds within the spectrum of the human voice, meaning that
      • 6. Digital phones can be dialed by whistling into them. It isn't easy but you can do it if you practice long enough (and are bored enough).

        DTMF numbers are made of two separate, simultaneous tones. For instance, the number one is a combination of 1209Hz and 697Hz. Please enlighten as to how you can whistle two tones at once.

      • You forgot:

        8. Rotary phones are the only way out of the matrix.
    • A few months ago, I was at my grandparent's house with my cousin's kids ( around 7 years old). She asked my grandpa if he would turn on the 'old computer' in his den so she could use it. She was referring to the typewriter.
    • "What really makes me sad is the knowledge that many people today have never even seen a rotary phone, let alone used one."

      Why does this make you sad? I mean I guess it's kinda cool and all, but if rotary is dying, what is the world losing? (or am I reading too much into that line? Apologies if I am.)
    • Note to self:

      Bring Cap'n Crunch whistle to South English...

      (They do still use a crossbar, right?)
    • For more information, I suggest reading old articles of Phrack.

      What kind of a world do we live in where the most readily available information about an electonic device of immense historical importance is information put together by and for people who were outsiders trying to break in? Why isn't all of Ma Bell's old secret internal documentation out in the open where future generations can learn from it?

    • It's the original digital phone - you insert your digit, then dial.

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by odano ( 735445 )
    I doubt we are going to have to worry about this catching on because it defeats the entire purpose of having a cell phone.

    It is a really cool creation though. The plans look so simple I only wish I had a rotary phone available to mess around with.

  • Imagine.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr Reducto ( 665121 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:06PM (#11438294) Journal
    Imagine how fun it would be to use this to send text messages!
  • Yay! .... Sorry, but I for one am glad that rotary phones have been tossed out the window. You can't dial nearly as fast and the size and shape of the phone is limited by the interface. But hey. Hacks are cool, so what can I say?
  • They were crappy. Some had springs at the dial that were so strong that if you didnt hold the phone with the other hand you would move it around while NOT turning the dial.
    Plus you started to hate people with numbers that had many 8 9 or 0 in it...

  • Yeah, great idea.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dickeya ( 733264 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:08PM (#11438310)
    People here in L.A. already drive badly enough with the current variety of cell phones...

    Police officer:
    So what caused you to rear-end that other car?

    Rotary cellphone user:
    I just took my eyes off the road for 15 to 20 seconds to dial a number and then ......

  • Personal Anecdote (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thunderstruck ( 210399 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:08PM (#11438312)
    I've had my rotary phones ever since I moved out on my own. I like them, possibly because I an clumsy with buttons. My closest friends, however, are fond of mocking my choice as follows:

    "Hi... yeah I'm over at Bob's place. I would have called sooner but he has a rotary phone."

  • Fun with rotary (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:09PM (#11438322) Homepage
    A quick trick of interest, perhaps good if you're ever in a situation where you can't use the dial pad and can't generate DTMF tones, is the super easy method of dialing a phone with nothing but the hangup switch.

    On a mechanical phone (eg, any cheapo phone that doesn't need power or beep or anything), pick it up and listen for dialtone. Then just tap the hang-up switch with pauses for each number. For example, if calling 708-482-0623, you tap the switch 7 times, pause, then 10 times, pause, then 8 times, pause, etc. Rinse & repeat.

    It's dirt simple, and most of us already know this, but... it's an easy fun thing to know.

    • Re:Fun with rotary (Score:3, Informative)

      by v1 ( 525388 )
      Clarification: there are two or three clicks to add in addtition to the number, and zero counts as 10. (plus the 2 or 3) So to dial a 7 you'd have to click it like 10 times... but at 10 clicks/second, which could be a little challenging.
      • You sure? I used to call people by doing the epileptic thing with the receiver hook, but I never had to add 2 or 3 clicks.

        • Re:Fun with rotary (Score:3, Informative)

          by wiggles ( 30088 )
          Same here. I used to have to use this little 'hack' on a certain phone I had where the 5 button no longer worked properly... Anytime I needed to dial a number with a five in it, it was "'Damn it!' tap-tap-tap-tap-tap"

          At least, it worked this way in 708 land....
      • Not in the USA. Here 1 pulse = Number 1, through 9, and 10 pulses = Number 0. Some other countries Japan, Korea, and parts of EU use 1 to equal the number 0, and 2 for 1, through 10 for number 9.

        I've dialled that way slapping the paddle on a payphone before!

    • So, if my laptop is dead or won't dial, and my mobile is dead with no way to charge it, and I have any kind of phone without a working dial pad, I'll try this. This assumes I can actually get a dial tone.

  • 19 is old? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by plasticsquirrel ( 637166 )

    I'm 19, and I used a rotary phone for probably ten years growing up. I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters have if they moved into an older home. The only real drawback to the phones is that there is no way to punch in numbers after connecting. When you hear "Press 1 to ...", the phones cannot handle doing that.

    I have fond memories of rotary phones, though. The satisfying click click click, the durable construction; they come from a time before phones were $10 pieces of junk. It's the same reason why so many prog

  • I am an old fart too and remeber the early ghetto blasters, this is just like that strange phenonema. There was a backlash against tiny transitor radios, so people carried a portable stereo around on thier sholder. If this catches on we will all need much bigger pockets.

    An old speaker phone would make a nice car phone!
    • Some of those old boom boxes, especially the Panasonic ones, were works of art.

      They were just so awesome looking compared to anything that's on the market today. All the shiny levers and knobs and buttons...

      I never had a really cool one, though. Was too young and lacked the cash. {:(

      -Z
    • I was about to say that you don't have to be that old of a fart. [imdb.com] But I guess 1986 really was a long time ago. Ouch!

  • Paint it red and turn it into a Batphone [millionaireplayboy.com].

    Seriously, I always wondered how Alfred carried that thing around when it had a cord attached to it. A cellular batphone could make much more sense.
  • I wonder if the original poster is aware that vinyl is still alive and kickin'?
  • We had a 1971 pinto in 1990... ;) Ran great...

    I bought a rotary phone a couple of months ago in Toronto at Active Surplus [activesurplus.com]... cost me $9.99

    I remember 8-tracks and vinyl - never owned any of my own though.

  • People will still recognize rotary phones as long as we keep giving toys like the Fisher Price Chatter Phone [fisher-price.com] to our kids. Who can forget that red, white, and blue phone with the googly eyes that moved as it was pulled.

    I remember it when I was a kid. I just noticed one in our house, so someone must have bought one for my kids. It would surprise me if it is the only rotary phone my kids have ever seen.

  • Why, I have one less than 1 ft away from me that works great - must be at least 20 years old. Wish I could say the same for all of the push button phones we've gone through over the years. It even has a proper bell for the ringer.

    It's retro, and I love it. The only thing you can't do with it is navigate those horrible menu systems that every company seems to love. You can't do that with a touch-tone phone most of the time, anyway so that's not really a loss. Every home should have one :)
    • No, every home should have two or three; one in the kitchen, a nice wall model with a loud ringer, and a black one on a desk next to one of those bright white Apple i-series computers, to balance the color. Or a typewriter, another such object of intrigue.

  • Dial a phone number? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SoCalEd ( 842421 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:27PM (#11438411)
    How long will it be before kids ask their folks:

    How come you say "dial" a number instead of push a number?

    Anyone *really* old remember the letter prefix phone numbers? "Just call Zenith 4265. Operators standing by..."
    • How long will it be before kids ask their folks: How come you say "dial" a number instead of push a number?

      Anyone *really* old remember the letter prefix phone numbers? "Just call Zenith 4265. Operators standing by..."

      How can I forget them from years of TV commercials? (Excuse my walk down memory lane, non-Detroiters.)

      TExas4-1100 (Twin Pines Dairy)

      WO3-8925 (I don't remember what this was. I hope it was not a pawn shop.)

      and the immortal
      TYler8-7100 (The original Mr. Belvedere. "We do good work". He's st
  • I can remember when rotary dial phones were items of everyday use, and not some object of retro-cool pseudo-nostalgia. Imagine my delight, then

    Stop right there. You imply distaste for the "retro-cool-pseudo-nostalgia" to which rotary phones have been relegated, and then immediately shift gears into experiencing "delight" at the prospect of a hack that indulges in that very quasi-nostalgia. Seems to make sense.
    • Exactly. "Retro-cool-pseudo-nostalgia" is something created by someone who wasn't there the first time around. A 15 year old cannot be "nostalgic" about Atari, for example, but they love buying the t-shirts in Hot Topic. A whole lot of Gen X culture has been coopted by the current generation of teenagers as "retro".
  • I found an old firebox phone with rotary dial, earpiece on a cord, and microphone similar to those seen from the '20's. I set it up to operate on our regular telephone line, and now use it out back in the "Florida room".

    Growing up in the '50's, and when dad was with the Signal Corps, we got to see a lot of the old communications devices, and still have bits and pieces saved over the years. I still use our old Hallicrafters receiver to tune into shortwave.
  • ...are not nostalgia. You still need them for scratching!

  • Why not take it a step further? (Score:5, Funny)

    by StressGuy ( 472374 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:34PM (#11438456)
    Build it into a loafer thus having a genuine "Maxwell Smart" shoe phone.
    .
    Hey, one good dated reference deserves another..

  • Good Luck Getting a Real Bell to Work... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @10:36PM (#11438480) Homepage Journal

    On a regular US land line, the incoming signal that sets the phone ringing is 90 Volts peak-to-peak. This voltage more or less drives the coils on the ringer directly. Because it's a genuine electromagnetic affair, it sucks down tons of current -- far more than you're going to get out of a puny cell phone battery running through an inverter.

    You're probably better off just playing a sound sample of an old-style ringer.

    Schwab

    • He assumed it's an electret. I find it amazing that someone who is trying to convert an old phone to anything doesn't know they have carbon button microphones, which produce a varying resistance according to incoming sound wave pressure.

      Oddly, they used to make drop-in replacements for those carbon buttons that were more modern, but it's probably getting harder to find them than the genuine thing.

      Also, the user interface issue of not knowing whether there was a problem with the call makes the hack much

    • Ever been wiring some phones and had it ring while in the middle of punching something down? It smarts quite a bit...

      POTS takes quite a bit of power to keep it running. In fact, in most COs there are huge banks of batteries to keep the phones up during a power failure. They normally don't run out, except during extended outages, like the great northeast outage of 2003.
  • Behold. [jwz.org] (circa 2000)
  • There used to be a unit called a celljack. It plugged into the DB-25 connector on a Motorola brick, and then the handset cable plugged into it IIRC.

    I remember seeing them in a magazine. I had the idea that you could mount one of those standard desktop touch tone phones in the center console of your car, and be a true player. I'm not sure if it would do pulse dialing. The proposed purpose I guess was to drive either phones on a boat, or run a fax machine or modem from a cell phone.

    We actually found a
  • I still remember the days of rotary phones. They were standard issue in the dorms when I was a college freshman in 1983. Some of the things I remember:

    Phoning long distance sucked. You'd roto-dial 11 digits and often get just a busy signal. Forget redial or speed dialing.

    They were damn near indestructable and when you did break them they could be repaired rather easily. It was not like the total component replacement of today. It was actually kind of fun to tinker with them.

  • First Post! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Psychor ( 603391 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @11:05PM (#11438607) Homepage
    First post via rotary phone! Took me a while to dial my ISP, but I hope I still got the first comment.

  • Old News.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mister Transistor ( 259842 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @11:06PM (#11438610) Journal
    Back in 1985, there used to be a device made by a company called Tellular that replaced the handset on the brick-phones of the day. That had a dial tone and loop current generator, and sensor for off-hook, (and of course dial pulses, which are rapid hookswitch pulses), and DTMF's. The device would also generate a 100V ring pulse for incoming calls. The net effect was you could plug a standard rotary or DTMF house phone into the box and it would fake a network interface, dial the cell phone and hit send automatically.

    I co-designed a system called "Limo-Phone" that interfaced between the phone and the Tellular box to time and charge for the call. This would let a Limousine have a standard TrimLine or Princess phone in the back, the fare could place calls while there like a normal phone, and the device would tally up the bill at the end of the ride!
  • I remember being a trepedacious teen trying to work up the courage to call a certain girl... and sitting there with my finger against the stop, the last number (a nine) half-dialled, heart pounding.

    I haven't thought about that in years. I guess now you could say it was "Obsolete Panic." :D
  • I have an old Commodore phone that came with my 300 baud Vicmodem. It's actually just a white Nortel rotary with the Commodore logo on the dial and front. I love the reactions I get from my kid's friends when they try to dial by pushing the numbers in the holes. "Mr. Ellis the buttons don't work" Ha HA FYI, with these old phones the carbon in the pickup needs to be loosed up every so often by hitting the receiver on something.

  • A much simpler solution (Score:5, Informative)

    by laing ( 303349 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @11:34PM (#11438704)
    Motorola makes something called a "Cellular Connection". It's a box that plugs into the phone on one side, and provides an RJ-11 POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) connection on the other. It supports pulse dialing too so there's no need for any PIC firmware debugging.

    --
    Sigs are a waste of space

    • Maybe, but do you know how much current it takes to ring an old, telco-owned rotary phone? We're talking about a pair of electromagnets the size of D cells here. I doubt that many devices designed to be portable would be able to supply enough to drive it.

  • that "whis-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-whis-k-whis-k" is the rotary equivalent of 911? Am I the only one who got it? Just a thought.
    • For those who did not get it, a "whis" would be the sound of the wheel of the phone rotating and the "k-k-k..." would be the pulse made by the phone. So "Whis" = dude turned the phone wheel "k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k" = a nine has been dialed, etc etc...

  • The MATRIX has you (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Saturday January 22, 2005 @03:08AM (#11439644) Homepage Journal
    I distinctly remember seeing a rotory phone hooked up to an acoustic coupler in the movie. It had an automatic mechanical thingie that worked the rotory dial. Morpheus used it to hack into the Matrix!

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