I am thinking of buying an old rotary dial phone. I understand that I need to have it set up for pulse dialing vs. the more modern tone dialing.
So can one jack be set up the old fashioned way with the phone company or does the entire account need to be set up one way or another?
Thank you. It is easier to post here than to try and call the phone company itself.
J.
Most of my phones are touch-tone (even that term is dated) but I still have a rotary dial phone. I don't use it often enough to bother replacing it, and I rarely dial out on that phone. It takes nothing special, account-wise.
The jacks are super-easy to install. Your local borg or Radio Shack will have everything you need.
Oh, so it would require installing a special jack? Do you mean the kind of jack that's the modern cord fits into -- with the plastic thingee that you press to get into the jack? This phone I'm thinking of is already adapted for a modern jack.
I was more worried about the pulse vs. touch tone sound issue... have I confused you? I'm getting confused...
Thanks.
You can't have just one jack set up differently, but it's common to have the phone system accept both tone and pulse dialing. Common, but not universal, some newer systems have dropped support for pulse dial.
Personally, I have VOIP at home, and can't take pulse dialing. The old rotary phone still works fine for answering, I just can't use it to dial out. And if I leave its ringer turned on, caller ID doesn't work on the modern phones.
Also, some old rotary phones were setup for party lines. In order to get them to ring on single lines you have to make a small wiring change inside the phone. It's easy to do but I haven't done it in awhile and don't recall where on the internet I found the information -- a bit of Googling was all it took.
Go for it. :)
Nope. Just take it home, plug it in ANY outlet/jack and USE it. No special arrangements or wiring are needed.
It may, or may not, ring properly depending on how the old rotary set is wired, but that is usually a non-issue.
This, of course, assumes you subscribe to "conventional" telephone service as opposed to VoIP (Vonage, etc). Have fun!
One additional item:
You might have to dial extra digits depending on what features you have on your account. For example, if you have privacy turned on, so that your number is not displayed, you might have to dial something like 1177 to turn privacy off if the called party doesn't accept private calls. i.e. *xx on pulse dialing becomes 11xx on a rotary phone. While you're checking with your phone company to see if they still support rotary phones, ask about using 11xx to toggle features on and off.
It'll work. just plug it in.
s
I like this answer the best. I want the phone just for nostalgic/style reasons -- a light blue princess phone from childhood. And it would be nice to have a landline phone that works during a power outage.
Thanks for all your ideas.
That's Princess
In that case, be sure to install the separate, external power supply so that the dial lights up.
The dial light is user-settable to go completely dark when the handset is hung-up or to emit a nice, muted glow for a night light.
Western Electric sure could build some nice stuff.
This is way off topic, but it is funny to me.
We were on a party line when I was young. I picked up the phone one day and a neighbor was ranting to the phone company.
He said........If I can't talk to my mother on Mother's day, you can just come get this GD phone!
It will be in the front yard when you get here!
"It's little. It's lovely and it lights" or so the ad used to say.
I had a party line in the duplex I rented in 1984, It may still be that way. The owner had a party line on both sides of the duplex with different phone numbers but it was the same line. He was probably the only guy in that area that had a party line.
Not only were we on party line, still had the old rotary crank to "central" and maintained own lines up to branch point near town where connected to their lines.
I remember distinctly first time in grade school need to call home and having to ask how to use the high-falutin' dial phone -- didn't have a clue of our number, just "long-short" for us, "two shorts for grandparents, various other combinations for the other roughly half-dozen farmsteads...
When we came back to the farm after Dad died unexpectedly in '99, discovered they were still paying the rental for the old dial phones which were the originals in the house since about '80-81 and return springs so sprung had to manually turn them back. All that rent paid over the years and didn't even ask for new ones when those wore out--I suppose because the old square black units probably weren't available any longer and didn't want any of that "new-fangled" stuff... :)
on 10/9/2007 7:58 PM snipped-for-privacy@aol.com said the following:
I miss the days when, if the person you were calling had the same prefix number, you only had to dial the last 4 numbers.
And........they weighed a ton.
I lived in Watts Bar TN in 1980. You could still get your party by dialing a 4 digit number. It might still be that way.
Actually the town is called Ten Mile.
....
Kewl!! I was in Oak Ridge for about 26 years, last 8-10 working at EPRI I&C Center built in conjunction w/ TVA at Kingston Fossil. Just met a gal here from Harriman who moved out w/ her husband a few years ago w/ Seaboard (pigs). Hearing her TN twang was music... :)
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Hehehehehe! That almost sounds like some of the customers I have dealt with.
Mother's Day was, and probably still is, the busiest day of the year, long distance-wise. It was, and may still be, often difficult to get a direct-dialed call to "go through" on the first attempt on Mother's Day.
You would be surprised to learn the number of folks that call their mother on Mother's Day - and make the call COLLECT!
The older Princesses needed the gray power cube for the dial light, but would work fine without. (Still have a few in the old phone crate, plus one the previous owner left hanging from an abandoned line in basement.) It was sometimes installed near the phone, sometimes in the basement, using Y-B to pass the power. The later Princesses were line powered. Great little cubes, damn near indestructible. Too bad phones are pretty much all they were good for.
aem sends...
It was 5 digits here (east Texas, in a small town where all numbers used the same "first 3 digits"). That changed to 7 digits around 1990 when they switched to ESS and 10 digits around 2004 with the new "overlay" area code.
BTW, I still haven't heard of anyone using that new area code, but we still have to dial 10 digits.
BTW2, I bought a washer and dryer last year in an old store. The salesman asked my phone number and wrote down 5 digits.
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