Rotary Cellphone | Hacker News Reader

Rotary Cellphone

justine-haupt.com

49 pointsink_1310 comments

There is a classic 60s/70s era rotary phone, vaguely similar to a princess phone, where the dialling mechanism is inside an extra-beefy handset. Not a lineman’s phone, but a regular consumer’s phone.

If a unit like this could be shoehorned into one of those, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

The Western Electric Trimline Phone, available in both touch tone and rotary dial. It also supplied the dial in this build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimline_telephone

https://img0.etsystatic.com/047/1/5765656/il_570xN.731185188...

Love this so much. The small display is also definitely something I'd like on a phone simply to display small information bits that then don't need the full powered up display.

On that note is there a good conversion (as in, make it into a USB keyboard) write-up for mechanical typewriters? I've seen one commercial kit before, but didn't follow through so far, even though I've got two still lying around.

There's USB Typewriter, though they're on hiatus.

https://www.usbtypewriter.com/collections/typewriters

This is great, but the arguments about how this is Actually Very Practical And Not At All Just A Fun Concept are laughable.

That's amazing. It's beautifuly well built.

I don't know how people can have the talent, time and energy to do this as a hobby.

Cool, though having recently used a rotary phone to navigate a phone menu I'm glad they died out.

> used a rotary phone to navigate a phone menu

That’s impossible. Rotary phones use pulse dialling exclusively, but phone menus/trees require the tone dialling of push button and touch-screen phones. I have never heard of any phone menu/tree, even at the dawn of their implementation in the late 80s when rotary phones were still common, supporting pulse based dialling.

Pulse to Tone converters are a thing. It's possible to use a rotary phone with one on things that expect DTMF tones, which is pretty much the entire world now.

Though, honestly, if you're the type to use a pulse to tone converter to keep your pulse phone alive and in use, you probably enjoy using it on a modern phone tree.

Or you paid way too much in AT&T equipment fees for decades before the breakup of Ma Bell and very much were going to get your money's worth for that $1000+ phone. My grandfather obstinately didn't want to replace a kitchen rotary simply for fun sunk cost economic reasons.

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