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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

The last paragraph makes it sound like old people struggling with the UX of new technology.

> 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?

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Sure. Switchboards were actual plugboards (often using the 1/4" jack, which was invented for this application). The operator would plug her headset into the user's socket to talk to him or her, then unplug the headset and (for a local call, or an internal call on a private exchange) connect the caller's socket to the callee's using cables.

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.)

> 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.

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.

This sounds like a guy I used to know who told me about how, when he got married, he'd intentionally pour a bunch of bleach in the laundry and ruin the whole load, just so that his wife would forbid him from ever doing laundry again and do it herself.

You could, in fact, dial them one-handed. A rotary phone uses pulse dialing; as the rotor turns it opens the circuit briefly, if you dial 5 it sends 5 pulses. So you can do the same by pushing the switch repeatedly and pausing in between each number as though the rotor was spinning back.

Same trick works on touch tone phones since the networks still support pulse dialing.

Some of the networks don't support pulse dialing anymore. Many of the Analog Telephone Adapters people use to access voip accounts don't either.

They make adapters to allow rotary on such systems:

https://www.dialgizmo.com/

You needed really fast fingers for this. The minimum is about 8 Hz. I could do it as a teenager, but I don’t think 70yo senators are going to like it.

I recall a friend of mine (when we were teenagers in the 80s) whose parents had a physical lock on their phone to prevent the dial turning (to prevent their kids running up phone bills I assume). Unlike his parents, my friend was aware of the "trick" you describe.

There was an information kiosk phone in the student union of my alma mater that could make long distance calls with pulse dialing using a button on the handset. It was well used.

Once as a kid I managed to misdial the emergency number (112) by just randomly pressing the switch, unaware of the trick and with no intention of calling anywhere.

I wonder if the emergency worker believed me when I apologized for accidentally calling him.

I had a similar experience doing some wiring on the phone jack and probably shorted the wires just the right number of times. At some point I heard a voice telling me I'd dialed the wrong emergency number (999 or 000 or something) and to hang up and dial the correct one (111 in my country). Lucky it was wrong because if I hadn't been able to receive their call back since I was working on the wiring, a cop would probably have turned up.

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.

Wind blowing on overhead telephone wires could cause this with is why 999 and 911 where used for Police in The UK and US

This was something that worked on pay phones (in the UK at least) to get free calls. I think it was around the 70s/80s? I can't remember the exact mechanism, but something like the coin unlocked the dial, so if you didn't need the dial you could make the call without a coin.

The good ol days of inband signaling / payment schemes ;)

Correct.

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...

But since they weren't performing the duties of telephone operators - a machine was - this was just an expression of the problem, namely they didn't like the ui. Previously, they communicated to a human being the identification of the person they want to connect to, and a human being connected the wires.

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.

I think that statement is more an expression of perceived motive. The senators were used to having a trained human employee making their connections "just work", suddenly this technology puts the onus on the end user. Why? Because in the long run, the technology is cheaper than employing a trained human. Are the telephone companies going to pass this saving on to the tax payer? Unlikely, certainly not in the near-term.

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.

> they weren't performing the duties of telephone operators - a machine was [...] There was no substantial difference to the responsibilities of the senators

Would you also say there is no substantial difference between typing a document yourself and dictating a document to a typist?

Does the last paragraph still holds? Today a lot of public talk is about the manipulation (as opposed to genuinely convincing, i.e. presenting the actual argument and not the most effective and machiavellistic argument ) of public opinion, and when we have masses of people specializing in this sort of manipulation, with help from social (psychology etc) scientists, and automated ('machine learning') optimization. In this climate, I'm not sure if it does.

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.

The rotary dials are a pretty horrible user interface: You have to turn the dial all the way to the stop and release it there. If you don't do that properly, you dial a wrong number. 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. 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. I remember that I struggled with all of these things as a child. The whole thing was a brilliant invention in its time, but I'm glad that it's obsolete.

Hm, number input is slow but once one is used to it it should be reliable. The problem of forgetting where you are (or being unsure if you dialed a wrong digit) is probably mostly down to the lack of any display of the digits dialed, which isn't inherently a problem of the dial interface, and indeed earlier touch-tone phones also lacked a display. That said, the slow dial speed, and maybe the slightly higher mental effort of dialing a digit, probably do increase the chance of losing your place, or feeling as if you have.

In practice it's really not that hard. We had a rotary phone until I was a teenager and never had any of these issues.

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.

Reading between the lines of gmueckl's post a little, it's not hard for most people, but there are several aspects to the process that would challenge people with one or more disabilities:

> 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?)

Where I live, the phone system started with 3 and 4 digit numbers for the local area. Calling another area code adds 5 digits. Local numbers have grown to 6 or 7 digits since then. So numbers that have to be dialed are often around 11 or 12 digits these days.

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.

That’s why dial tone was such an improvement. It’s amazingly recent too. One of my teacher’s mother was on the team at Bell Labs that invented it.

I assume you mean touch tone.

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.

It was deliberately slow to deal with limitations of the tech at the time and also the finger stop tells you when you have finished and can let go.

>You have to turn the dial all the way to the stop and release it there. If you don't do that properly, you dial a wrong number.

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

> The last paragraph makes it sound like old people struggling with the UX of new technology.

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.

> One has to use both hands to dial

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?

You have to lift the handset off the hook and hold it in one hand and use the other hand to dial, meaning dialing required using both hands.

This picture shows an example https://www.alamy.com/man-uses-old-rotary-phone-image2272405...

Thanks! I had a dial phone growing up and we would often just use the same hand to both hold the handset and dial the phone (just stick one finger out a little bit while holding the handset and use it to dial).

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