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Build Your Own Rotary-Dial Cell Phone
hwestiii writes "Yet another indicator of how unrepresentative of the main Slashdot crowd I am (meaning 'old') is that, like vinyl records, 8-track tapes, and Pintos, I can remember when rotary dial phones were items of everyday use, and not some object of retro-cool pseudo-nostalgia. Imagine my delight, then at finding this project in which an old rotary phone is turned into a cell phone. To give credit where its due, I originally found it linked from Hack A Day. I know nothing about home-built electronics projects, but this is enough to make me want to learn. If this catches on, imagine what they'll have to do to those 'turn off your cell phone' messages that play in movie theatres."
"from the whis-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-k-whis-k-whis-k dept."
Shouldn't that be:
from the whis-k-k-k-k-whis-k-whis-k department
Unless of course, building this project means you need to dual 911. In that case, I'll stay away.
I have both used an abacus and washed my clothes on a washboard. But I don't feel superior for being older. Instead, I feel ... er, older. Look at all this gray hair! Well, the women like it, so it can't be all bad...
Anyhow, I've heard from actual /.ers who have related their confusion upon being confronted with a rotary telephone, so the post is entirely appropriate. You may have managed to go your entire life without running into any "obsolete" technology, but most of us don't work at Fry's.
As for progress, don't get me wrong, I love progress. I have my nice Pentium 4 and my nice ThinkPad and my nice GSM phone and my nice DSL and my nice non-lame MP3 player with as much space as a Nomad. And yes, Touch-Tone was a massive improvement over rotary. I was just sad to see it go.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
my parents didn't have a push button phone till about 3 years ago. And they still have 3 rotary phones in use in the house. We finally bought them a cordless phone, so they made big leap. They simply didn't want a new phone, like many people, if it's not broke why waste money on it. They make more then enough money, but they just bought a "new" car a year ago, it was a 97, my father drives a 92.
Until we bought them a new tv 2 years ago they still had their tv from 1984, bought after the previous one broke. Then we had to get them a VCR, they were on their second one since 84, and it's used 5 nights a week to record the news to watch later that night. Also they didn't get cable tv till 1999.
Plenty of people stick with what they have, this is why no new tech will ever sweep through and eliminate something old. The old base has momentum and lots of it. On a more related to slashdot perspective, their computer is a PII 400 that was still running the original install of win95 that came with it up until about 1.5 years ago when we put winXP on it (note that for being an install of win95 that went for years it had no virus or Trojan issues and such). It just worked for them, and they don't want a new computer anytime soon.
As soon as the AT&T breakup happened, lots of cheap touch tone phones flooded the market and people upgraded.
Or downgraded. I'd say the peak of landline technology was the touchtone version of the phone in the article. Compared to those, most phones since have just been cheap crap. Cheap crap with lots more features, granted, but show me anything since that equals the reliability, that has as well-designed a handset.
When they just rented the phone to you, and if it didn't work they'd have to send a guy in a truck to your house, they built 'em to last.
About the sadness of seeing old rotaries disappear:
/. account). I still remember very clearly how dialing a rotary was such a PITA.
I am not a single bit sad about the introduction of new technology. Very much on the contrary (I even have this
What really makes me sad, and I have found that many people agree with me, is the absolute lack of a notion of elegance and style of today's products. Everything really wants to look very "mawderrrrn-ish", future-ish, techie-ish. So what we get these days an awful fucking lot of gray/silver (or anything that makes sure it looks like metal) combined with those aggressive "johnny-too-slick" lines and contours. Most products today strive to look like those silly Matrix-Terminator-Blade Runner-inspired Macromedia Flash presentations (with metal-like looks AND metal-like sounds) or teenage Linux desktop screenshots submitted by kids called M0rpheus, D33struktor or L0rd ov da Ka0s.
Under this pile of downright ugly designs, yes, many things from the 80s begin to look really cool. Or some kind of product version "for adults", at least. And don't even get me started on things from the 30s or the 60s, when the human factor was taken into a lot more consideration and the general taste en vogue was not so obsessively attached to technology and 21st-century space cowboys.
BTW, I am only 32 years old.
Have you ever used an abacus?
[snip]
People not having used obscolete technology is called "progress" not "sad."
How many modern gadgets do you have where you can teach a novice how it works? I mean in real detail. I mean the real fundamentals.
Abacuses and sliderules were great and are still better than using calculators for teaching people math. Sure calculators are better than sliderules for doing arythmatic, but these are different issues.
I don't like punchcards either, but I find them useful for demonstrating how binary information works as ones and zeros.
And it is a whole lot easier to show someone how a telephone works using a rotary telephone built primarily out of wire-based circuits rather than the nice fancy IC-based systems we have today.
Don't get me wrong. Using the new technology is usually faster/more efficient/more plesant than using the older technology, but it is FAR easier to learn a subject by studying the simpler usable systems of the past than it is by studying the cutting-edge.
I am in the under-30 crowd. I saw my first punch-card when accompanying my grandmother to check the results of her computer programs (I was probably 3 the first time I remember seeing one). Yes, my grandmother could program a computer. Knowledge of what the punch-cards and readers actually looked like made it easy for me to understand the ideosyncracies of Fortran (which is what I think my grandmother used to program, given that she was an astrophysicist, but she had passed away by this point so I never got to ask).
When I started studying telephony in order to impliment inexpensive solutions for my business, I started with the rotary telephone and worked my way forward. I know have a strong understanding of many aspects of telephony and my knowledge of the fundamentals would not have been as wasy to develop had it not been for studying the rotary phone.
Progress is great, but it does isolate us from the fundamentals. To learn something well, you have to study the fundamentals. For that, often we want to look back to the simplest examples of working technology so that we can learn them.
That is what this article is about, btw. It is about a bunch of people who find it interesting to *learn* something, helping others do the same by publishing cool little projects.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's down in my basement. It came with the house, actually. Since every other phone in the house requires A/C to function, it's useful to have around for power outages and such.
Maybe, but do you know how much current it takes to ring an old, telco-owned rotary phone? We're talking about a pair of electromagnets the size of D cells here. I doubt that many devices designed to be portable would be able to supply enough to drive it.