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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

The phone cluster was especially amusing to see in the context of visiting a small history museum in Ohio earlier today with my kids (12 years old) and explaining to them about how a rotary dial phone worked.

(The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)

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Sometimes this is exaggerated. How do people view slide rules, telegraphs, and gramophones, or other historical artifacts from a further generation ago? They aren't that strange, and neither should rotary phone or film be to the current generation.

I agree on your general idea but rotary phones were a real PITA.

They were slow to operate. We jumped in a very short time to numberpad phones, which initially only replayed the analog signal of rotary phones. I'm surprised that nobody built an analog phone with a numberpad that operated a hidden rotary dial before electronics got everywhere. It would probably need to be plugged into main but those phones were not mobile so a socket was always available.

On the other side, a 33 or 45 rpm record is only inconvenient to store and transport but it plays back in the same time of any modern music format and seeking is not so bad: you can see where you move the head and with a little of practice one gets quite good at it.

Cassettes were another PITA.

The slowness of rotary phones is coupled to the exchange, which expects pulses at a specific rate (about 10 per second). Shifting to a keypad form factor doesn't speed that up, and would mean you need to be careful about how quickly you dial (or have a way to buffer keypresses). I think that's a major reason why keypad dialing and DTMF signaling were so closely connected.

I know how it worked. Buffering (probably complicated on a pure mechanical device) or locking the keys until the dial came back to rest would still be better than rotating and misrotating the dial.

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