Also, every phone had its own physical circuit to the exchange, leading to things like this: https://i.redd.it/ugvoc90k4q5a1.jpg
There were also specialist circuits (e.g. EPS) where you had a physical line from end to end (with a couple of amps along the way on longer runs).
We also had some large campus type sites where we would sometimes implement EPS to do LAN extension over the onsite twisted pair as it was cheaper than installing fibre and just about fast enough.