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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."
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.