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Comment by gmueckl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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

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.

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.

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