Senate Considers Banning Dial Phones (1930)
senate.gov
senate.gov
> the dial phone "could not be more awkward than it is. One has to use both hands to dial; he must be in a position where there is good light, day or night, in order to see the number; and if he happens to turn the dial not quite far enough, then he gets a wrong connection."
I’m guessing with the previous version you just picked it up and had an operator to route the calls?
This is one of the odd things about the fad for rotary-shaming today's teenagers: the rotary-dial system hasn't even been around all that long. Bell produced how-to-dial-your-new-rotary-phone films in the mid-'thirties and the mid-'fifties https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/introducing-the-dial-te... https://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/5/30/AT&T-Ar... , to say nothing of the rest of the world. There are undoubtedly still some people who are so old that they still aren't comfortable with rotary dialing. (In fact, I read someone on Twitter claiming to know some old English women who don't know how to dial a telephone, as they always used to get their husbands to do it for them. I'm guessing they may be pretty posh old ladies, as the early-twentieth-century public-school set had a reputation for being technophobic.)
My grandma was Scottish but she was like that. She eventually learned but, when I was a kid she'd always have me or my sister or cousins dial for her because my grandpa had always done it for her. I'm pretty sure she always knew how, I think she just didn't want to or like doing it. She'd always make this big act about how it was too hard to figure out though, would make attempts at dialling, dial the wrong number a bunch then tell us to do it but it always seemed like she was just doing it on purpose.
Same trick works on touch tone phones since the networks still support pulse dialing.
I wonder if the emergency worker believed me when I apologized for accidentally calling him.
It sounds like you were in a country where the number 112 was just 4 pulses in total, which is easy to accidentally dial. Some other countries require 3 sequences of 9 or 10 pulses (000, 111, or 999). 111 in New Zealand where the digit to pulse count mapping is reversed.
Senators are required, since the installation of dial phones in the Capitol, to perform the duties of telephone operators
And also seems that it was more than UX that bothered them...
Now, they connected to a machine and told the machine an identification standing for the person they wanted to connect to, and the machine connects them. There was no substantial difference to the responsibilities of the senators, except that they no needed to know an additional way of identifying a person.
If they had spoken into a computer and said the name of the person who they wanted to talk to, and the computer routed the call, they would have been doing the duties of telephone operators exactly as much as they were when they were twisting a disc with their finger.
But they would not have objected to the ux and they would not have said they were "required ... to perform the duties of telephone operators".
It is important to understand what a person is saying when trying to interpret their meaning. Give as full force to their words as possible, without turning them into a fool or an idiot who says things that are patently untrue.
So the senators are objecting to having to put their cup of coffee down, steady the phone with one hand, turn the dial with all their might with another hand - five (?) whole times - pick up their coffee again, only to find out that they've misdialled and have to start the whole process again. Just so that some telecoms fat cat gets a bigger paycheck.
Would you also say there is no substantial difference between typing a document yourself and dictating a document to a typist?
That's bad, because we lost the basic trust in human communication to say what you mean. Of course this is not meant to be nostalgic, deception was always present, but never so normalized, natural and _not_ a social taboo as it is today.
Also note that 10 digit dialing for all numbers is a fairly recent thing. We had 7 and 5 digit dialing - less to remember where you are in dialing.
> Mobility and dexterity, being able to dial the dials
> Memory and cognition, remembering where you are in the process
> (he didn't mention this) Sight, being able to see the dial accurately and consistently
I was also able to use the dial phone as a kid, but I'm glad it's gone, too.
(By the way, is there any way to make a bulleted list in hackernews text?)
I did learn using the rotary phone and had little trouble using it, but I quite distinctly remember falling into all of the traps that I listed for some reason or another.
I fail to understand why it's hard. You stick your finger in hole of the number that you want to dial. Then you rotate it clockwise until it hits the stopper[1] and release. None of the steps require any precise movement.
>You need to know that you have to let the dial return to its original position before you can dial the next number. If you don't, you dial a wrong number.
Might be confusing for the first time user, but it's not a hard thing to remember. As a whole, the instructions for operating it are relatively straightforward, on par with operating door locks and combination safes.
>There is no feedback regarding the digits you already dialed. If you're trying to dial a long number and forget which digit you're at in the process, you have to hang up and restart.
That's hardly exclusive to the rotary dial. I still do it with touch tone phones (usually the "dumb" ones without fancy LCD displays) and password inputs (since the characters are masked).
[1] The piece of metal above the "0": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rotarydial.JPG
And even after it was invented, it took quite a while to fully roll out. I remember in the early 80s having a push button phone that had to be set to pulse dial in order to use it where I was living.
With the insight of some extra 90 years we know that the dial is a horrible UX. Actually, we're getting back to voice, by telling to the phone who we want to talk to. But they had very little choice back then.
I don't understand why would you need to use both hands to dial. Were those old dial phones different than what we imagine today when we picture a dial phone?
This picture shows an example https://www.alamy.com/man-uses-old-rotary-phone-image2272405...
> The Congressional Record would not be mailable, he said, "if it contained in print what Senators think of the dial telephone system."
"Not being mailable" is probably a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
The idea of being unable to send "obscene" mail, even private correspondence, is hard to imagine compared to our modern understanding of free speech.
If you watch old movies, you can see the pre-dial telephones in operation as the operators set up calls. It would take a while. One convenience is that you could have the operators call you back when they had reached the other party.
Some years ago, I was shown how to operate a (enclosed) freight elevator by someone who apparently thought I was kind of dumb not to know how they worked. I don't know how common the setup was, nor how old or typical it was, but among the features it lacked that modern passenger elevators have - it didn't travel to and stop at a floor automatically; you had to start and stop it with a control at the right spot; it didn't open and close the doors automatically; you had to pull on a strap, and close guards separately, and I'm not sure I even recall any locking mechanism.
I seem to recall that there was a locking system but I can't quite recall what it was. It was either that here was some sort of piece of metal that stuck out from the lift shaft and only allowed the doors to be opened at certain positions in the shaft, or that the lift wouldn't operate without the doors being closed, or some combination of both.
They, unfortunately, are on a higher floor with no elevator. So every time they have to talk on the phone they have to get 3+ flights of stairs.
We got over those things because those technologies eventually made most of us more efficient. I do my own programming and typing.
But there are still people who have other people do those things. The thing that probably got the Senators to use dial phones was the realization that they didn't want the operator listening to their conversations. Today they probably all have burner phones. But I doubt that Senators do their own typing, and they probably still use a secretary to make official phone calls for them.
And while the switchboards were automated, I don't think even today our phone systems are "dial only." Certainly through the '90s I recall dialing an operator for international and reverse charge calls and I think operators still serve customers with disabilities. That's not even counting all the customer support positions that are mostly redirecting calls.
The funny thing is you'd think the web would have ended it, but more sites are adding chat boxes, or they want your phone number to set up an account...