Exploring and having fun with rotary telephones | Hacker News Reader

Exploring and having fun with rotary telephones

danieljones.au

63 pointsdaniel_j54 comments

Very nice job! Last month I also adapted a rotary phone but I replaced the insides with a Bluetooth chip (and some more). Now I can use it as a headset for my smartphone or laptop. While you had to learn about SIP and voltage converters I had to learn about Bluetooth and digital audio protocols. Looks like we both had fun ;)

https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...

Wow, this is a project I've been kicking around for years! I have an old red rotary phone (a bit newer than yours) held aside just for it.

Definitely bookmarking your post

If you're comfortable designing PCBs I would definitely take that route and base it on the components I've used. Mine has a couple of irritations (not able to charge when off, voltage dropping below 5v after the battery loses a bit of power so the mic and speaker stop working, etc). Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

I grew up with no choice in this matter. Then there was a period when "touch" dialing was available for an exhorbitant premium.

There's something so Brooklyn / Portland about wanting to relive this for the romance. It sucked.

For me it is a lot about the noise and feeling of the dial, I get satisfaction out of them. Can you expand on Brooklyn/Portland? Is that hipster or something? I can imagine it did suck to _actually_ use, the faster 20pps dials feel quite a lot faster.

In the 90s there was a charge on my mom's phone bill for touch tone dialing. I called up to dispute the charges but the phone company wouldn't have any of it so I had them remove the "service" and they warned me that she wouldn't be able to dial out any more. I flipped a switch on her phone to simulate pulse dialing and a few months later switched it back. She was never charged again.

That pulse switch always felt so strange to me. It was the Rosetta of POTS.

I remember growing up our family got an extra phone we could use in the basement (I think it came with a magazine subscription oddly) . It had the keypad, but would just generate the pulses like a rotary phone. Very slow and felt wrong. I’m pretty sure this phone didn’t have the switch to go into “tone” dialing mode like our other phones which were only tone.

it wasn't the famous "sports illustrated" sneaker phone which some versions had the pulse/tone switch (see photos of 2 different sole keypads) .

https://oldphoneworks.com/products/the-sports-illustrated-te...

I don't remember the sneaker phone, but I do remember the football phone:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-sports/the-funk...

I didn’t remember that one, pretty fun. I do remember the “nfl follies” game blooper vhs tape. Was pretty funny. I can’t imagine them doing another one.

As a kid, I always had this fear that if I had to dial 0 and I waited too long before the next digit, the operator would be summoned to the line. Waiting for that 0 to finish its long turn was stressful.

A fun fact about pulse dial is that you can dial a digit d by quickly tapping the switch hook d times (zero is 10 taps).

This is useful for dialing from a phone with the dial intentionally disabled or removed.

I've shared this story before, but you may find it amusing:

Back in 1996, I was living in Almaden Valley (South San Jose) and we had underground utilities. We also lived on top of an underground stream. After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy!

I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police. Open up!"

I asked the officers what the problem was and they said "We got a 911 call with no one on the line. We tried to call you back, but no one answered. So we had to come out and investigate."

I invited them in and said, "I think I know what happened." They followed me over to the landline speakerphone in the kitchen and listened to the clicking.

Then I explained, "You remember the old rotary dial phones? They worked by making and breaking the circuit, just like this clicking. Even if we all have touch-tone phones these days, the phone lines are still compatible with the rotary dial. So somewhere in the midst of all this clicking, there were nine fast clicks in a row, and then one click, and one more. And that dialed 911. Sorry about that!"

Heard a similar story about why the german emergency number is 110 and not the easier to memorize/type 111: The latter is 3 clicks on the line with generous spacing requirements, the former 12 clicks. So 111 would be much more prone to misdialing than 110.

(I guess the international number 112 is a compromise. Still a low number of clicks, but I suppose the timing would be more difficult to get right?)

Similar in Norway. One source of frequent misdiallings were from housewives dusting off the rotary phone, accidentally dialling 111.

111 was also easy to butt-dial on cellphones that had physical buttons.

Greetings from Sweden. Before switching to European standard 112 in 1996, the emergency number was… 90 000.

Three reasons for that:

1) Unlike most other countries, the Swedish dials had the number nine, and not zero, at the end. So "90 000" was considered easy to remember and easy to hit, even in the dark.

2) "90 000" was relatively easy to call by hand using the switch hook, on a telephone without a functioning number plate. (Swedish system had 1 click for zero, not 10.)

3) The statistical probability of a loose contact or some other type of electrical fault producing the sequence "90 000" is small.

If 1 click was for 0, how many clicks for 1?

I would imagine 2

Exactly. D+1 for every digit.

I support a PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point, aka "911 center"). We see one of these every couple of months. It used to be less frequent. The incumbent wireline carrier here is letting the cable plant rot and it's happening more often.

Seems like that telco should get fined for misuse of 911...

It's maddening to see the wireline assets rotting and failing. In my opinion the ILECs have a ton to answer for.

This wouldn't have happened if the number was 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3.

in 1980-90ies, playing with the switch was the way to get to "external" and dial things outside of a hotel (or office or factory, for example). And it worked because the central city-level switch-stations were replaced with much-faster-digital ones, while the local hotel/office/whatever were still old slow ones. So the old ones missed the too-fast-random-pulses series while the central ones picked it. Eh, one has to try multiple times to win that lottery..

Why would a phone with the dial intentionally disabled be connected to anything?

Single-purpose phone; you pick it up and are automatically connected to somewhere (e.g. help line next to a kiosk).

My father said his parents had installed some kind of lock on the dial to prevent the use

Yeah, they used to look like this

https://i.redd.it/vrt3vkxxfug81.jpg

It's an attempt to make the phone receive-only, a cost cutting measure.

I know about the switchhook trick from friend's father who actually used it to bypass this measure on a phone installed at his military unit during the mandatory military service.

They were sometimes deployed for "incoming calls only" as used by certain service desks, but more often when directly connected to a particular end point. In this case lifting the handset would immediately signal the local Switchboard Operator (or perhaps other designated number) in a large building. These use cases have included situations where the public might have access, but not the right to call anyone e.g. behind a panel in a lift ("elevator") for emergency use. At some point the function became known as "hotline" in certain PBXs.

Going back a little further it was common not to have a dial at all, with the operator being signalled immediately, literally patching your call manually through a series of other locations.

The British GPO746 is another classic model in this category. Just like UK Mellor-style traffic lights, the design was licensed to multiple manufacturers each of whom had their own quirks. This should be labelled as a nerd cognitohazard — once you know, you are at risk of trying to collect one of each type and then compare them (phones and traffic lights)!

I too have had little luck getting my hardware to activate the phone’s chimes but that at least led me to another fun quirk. The cabling for the phone has named wires that corresponded to the original switchboard connectors, which looked like enormous headphone jacks. They had two contacts: one at the tip of the plug and one for the collar that sits around the plug behind the tip, separated by insulation. The collar is ring shaped so this part of the circuit is called the ring connection.

Whoever dreamt that naming scheme up? It would be like calling the dial — where you set in the number you wanted to dial with you hand — the hand-set! Or calling a mute button the ear-peace!

I'm usually good at avoiding visual distractions but I gave up trying to read this.

If you are on Firefox, you can select "View->Page Style->No Style" for easier reading in this case.

Where is 'View'?

So sorry. Turn Menu's on. First Menu is File, Second is Edit, Third is View ( or if underlined Alt-V) In the View Menu, is Page Style ( or Alt-y ). Options is Basic Page stye or no style. I believe he was referring to view, Page Style, No style.

Alt key makes menus visible (at least on Linux).

yeah sorry about that, I've removed the cool walking background sprite. I'm going for a 90's theme, where eveyrthing looked awful but felt really personal

Still unreadable IMHO. Maybe the text is insightful, but I can't get beyond the froufrou.

The chibi figures are adorable, buut, how about not making them position: fixed?

> I'm going for a 90's theme

You succeeded. I was transported back to better times.

I'll take that genuine Old Web energy over a Substack or Reddit post any day. Thanks for being yourself and not just another drone. <3

Still there (the one on the bottom) on safari mobile. I wouldn't mind but Reader Mode doesn't work either (iOS 18.2 beta (22C5142a)).

The site has a very '90s vibe.

Check if your browser has "Reader mode". On Firefox there is a button in URL bar or you can press Ctrl+Alt+R.

Clicking the Reader Mode icon in the Firefox URL bar worked perfectly for me, the page was fully boring-ified while leaving the main content intact.

I miss my Demon Dialer!

https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/bc-swi...

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

https://www.ebay.com/itm/364474910535

In the 80's we were calling friends in Poland from France. Together with my brother, we were tasked to turn the dial over and over again -- you would need 1 or 2 hours of dialing to get through (I still have the automatic failure message in my head).

We found all kinds of tricks to protect our fingers. Today I would try to build a manual dialer based of an ESP32 or something :)

The article's link to sip2sip.info usefully led to a SIP Settings page, which in turn discussed NAT traversal & linked to how to 'Turn off SIP ALG support in your router' on another helpful site.

Why did this reappear as if I posted it today? I posted this 6 days ago, weird

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

Oh interesting, thanks for linking this, neat.

Are there any VOIP boxes that work with dial phones?

The Grandstream HT802 is the device I am using. It allows two analog phones (including dial phones) to connect to a VOIP provider. Each phone can have different servers.

Great. Now I have eye cancer.

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