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Not even a land line?.

Who do you think owns the landlines?

Depending on where you live, you either get AT&T, Centurylink (formerly Qwest, and USWest before that), or Verizon.

here's a map. A bit old, so the names are wrong, but the areas are still accurate.

USWest is now CenturyLink, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, Bellsouth, and Ameritech are now the new AT&T, and Bell Atlantic and NYNEX formed Verizon.

Telephones and calculators (well, adding machines) have opposite layouts for a reason: slowing down the key presses on your phone. Try dialing a long number (like an account number) into automated phone tree on a phone quickly: a good cell phone will 'cache' the numbers and send out the DTMF sounds more slowly than your rapid keypresses. On a landline dialing too fast will often result in errors since they usually lack this feature.

You can read more about Bell/Western Electric's development of the telephone keypad here.

The cardboard computer

http://www.porticus.org/bell/belllabs_kits_cardiac.html

You might want to read this article, it was written in 1984 before the internets, it sums it up nicely. http://www.porticus.org/bell/whatkilledmabell.html

The problem is that an advanced technology does not contain information to infer the intermediate stages.

Take semiconductors, for instance. The first transistor was patented in 1947, by coincidence the year of the alleged UFO crash in New Mexico. Some conspiracy theorists have used this coincidence to claim that semiconductors were reverse engineered from alien technology. But there is a catch.

There is absolutely nothing in a modern semiconductor that could have been used to accelerate the development of the transistor in 1947. Not even the raw material of the chip would be of any use, the first transistors were made of germanium which is not used anymore. The first transistor was built by adding a second contact to a point-contact diode, which had been known for decades. An example of a point-contact diode is the galena detector that has been used in crystal radios for a hundred years now.

From point-contact transistors technology evolved to junction transistors and integrated circuits. There's a step-by-step record of this development that would be much different if it consited of reverse engineering of an advanced technology. A simple look at the first transistor is enough to see that it derives from the crystal detectors that had been used for several decades by 1947.

Well, you used to legally be required to lease your phone from Ma Bell.

http://www.porticus.org/bell/bell_system_property.html

You CAN still go buy an unlocked phone and connect it to a providers network, you just pay through the nose for the phone, and don't get a discount from the carrier. They'll be happy to connect it for you as long as the tech is rthe same though.

I still have slide rules I used in high school, which makes them some 35 or so years old. I also still have my CARDIAC from the early 1970s.

They both still work perfectly.

I always wanted a desktop cellphone.

Cell phones designed for home use are sort of the 'next big thing,' at least to the cell companies. Each of the 3 major carriers seems to either have one out already, or in the works.

It makes sense -- right now, they've pretty much saturated the market for cell phones: I don't know a man, woman, or child in the U.S. that wants a cell phone that doesn't have one (people who truly can't afford them excepted, although the barrier to entry is getting lower by the month; there are some prepaid phones that verge on being disposable they're so cheap). Once you've put a device in everybody's pocket in the country, where can you go? The logical step is to start chipping away at the other places where they still use non-cell phones. Offices are tough (you have PBXes and complex switching requirements), so instead the carriers are going for the remaining home phones.

To me it seems a bit ironic that the "smart home phone" -- a mythical central-hub unit that does voice, video, and text communication, plus provides news and other information feeds -- which has been a broken promise from wireline phone companies for literally decades, is finally going to be delivered ... only the network behind it will be a wireless one, not POTS, and far from being the local telcos' salvation, it may be the final nail in their coffin. (That is, unless they really get over their reluctance and embrace a future of being bit-pushing broadband ISPs.)

500 sets.

kick everyone out on the next election, and keep doing it until someone removes the monopoly provisions.

Assuming running redundant data lines was not cost prohibitive then allowing every single provider to run their own lines would return us to this point: http://www.porticus.org/bell/images/phone_lines.jpg

Far better to only run one set of copper/fiber but always allow competitors access to it.

The Princess telephone and some Trimline telephones made by Western Electric use a transformer to light up the dial. In the old days, the telephone installer would simply plug the transformer into an outlet in an out of the way place, like a laundry room, and then wire the transformer to the yellow and black wires of the home telephone wiring.

I highly recommend the reading of the "Rape of Ma Bell" written by two ex-AT&T engineers who were around during the halcyon days of Ma Bell. You can download it for free at: http://www.porticus.org/bell/rapeofmabell.htm It is an extremely thorough book that makes a good point that perhaps the breakup of Ma Bell could have possibly been the worst thing ever done "for the greater good." In short AT&T was punished for being too successful. Instead of creating an environment that was condusive to competition via minor regulation, the FCC busted up a very efficient organization in the attempt a competitive environment for the consumer, but really was just punishing AT&T for being too good at what it did. An argument could be made, "Hey if they did not break up the phone company, then we would still be paying through the nose for long distance and still renting phones!" Well, who's to say that competition would not have come along anyway, especially if "everyone" was so pist off with the old curmudgeon that AT&T was always portrayed as.

You should read a bit of the 'other side' before you jump to conclusions.

Bell Companies were highly regulated. The system was contorted in its policies to aid in implementing a Progressive Social policy; the ramifications of which were substantial cost distortions. Rather than admit that the Congress and the government had written these details in law, a rather public farce placed the blame on greed.

So get the facts.

You can start here: http://www.porticus.org/bell/don_lively-3.html

Then Google finds out that people would rather use Yahoo or MSN Search for $0.00/search than Google for $0.10/search.

Yahoo or MSN? I'm sorry. They didn't pay their "premium interactive latency" fees to AT&T, so you'll have to wait about 30 seconds per connection attempt. But, hey, at least it's free!

Then Google and AT&T discover that colluding to keep a competitor out of the market is a violation of antitrust law.

Hahahahahahahaha. You must be new. First, neither Google nor AT&T have monopolies in their respective fields. Second, who is "the competitor" here? If Google simply bids high enough to get a guaranteed chunk of dedicated bandwidth from end-to-end, it's up to Yahoo to bid enough to get back that chunk. No one's colluding with anyone. And even if -- by some freakish warping of the seventh dimension there was a judge who decided that there were possible antitrust violations -- it'd move with the blazing speed of the .... judicial branch. So assuming Google and AT&T started colluding (*snicker*) in November of 2007, the case would finally be resolved in .... (carry the one) ... January of 2015.

But until then you'd have nearly a decade of idyllic, free-market free-for-all on the Internet. Joy!

-jdm