Easy there, we still have elevators.
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I can still feel (muscle memory) the pull of dialing a rotary phone. How you had to make sure to hit all the way to the end. That roundedness. Waiting patiently for it to roll back for the next number. And how much easier it was when the dial went plastic instead of metal.
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I hear you. My family held on to our rotary dial phones for quite a while - no real reason to get rid of them. It has been rather mind-blowing to see the progression of telephony in my lifetime alone: rotary dials and āOxford 7 - 3401ā to smartphones and 9-digit numbers. Personally, I stick with landlines. The thing is that I donāt want to be available 24/7.
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Buckingham 1 - 8329 for meā¦fist bump!
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Ah, those were the days . . . ours was Jackson - something or other.
I do wonder if having a 1024 digit phone number would help with the spam.
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POTS-v6?
I remember when pops bought a push button phone from Radio Shack (gasp!) And ran a āpirateā third line to the upstairs landing.
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It was a very satisfactory feeling for me.
As was being able to slam the receiver to indicate that I am pissed off and this conversation is over, end of story.
What happened to the other digit? Mine is ten digits.
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Sorry, youāre right, of course.
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Yes, it was. The weight was impressive. And I loved the sound too.
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Thatās what we need on our cell phones: a button that makes a loud slamming sound then hangs up.
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The finished product was retired, but you can still DIY
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I wonder if it includes a link to the accelerometer so it will sense hitting the wall? Asking for a friend.
ETA oh different product.
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This is from 1967ā¦the vintage? mod? old-fashioned? strobe lights and sets (donāt be fooled by the thumbnail with the Lego back drop, LOL!), along with the other visual effects, not to mention the costumes. Yes, I miss the world of when I was going on three years old, LOL!
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Iām more than a little obsessed with the Fairlight CMI. Itās such a showcase for nascent tech with its light pen, chunky computer keyboard, and clunky CRT. Itās a really wild example of early digital synth tech.
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Really depends on the switching system in your area. Back in the day, I worked on a tech product that had a dial up modem built into it and I remember how the simple act of, you know, dialing a fucking phone number to connect to the POP was fraught with inconsistencies.
Some places wanted 7 digit numbers, some wanted 9, some wanted 10. Some wanted 7 but would work with 9 or 10. Others wouldnāt. It was a nightmare to get it right, and if it was wrong you ended up with angry customers calling support.
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Truthfully, my comment was about the satisfying experience of using a metal rotary dial.
But since you mention phone slammingā¦
Soon after I got my first cellular phone in 2003, I had an aggravating phone call with Ikea customer support. I wanted to slam the phone down, but realized I could only had an END button to push. That wasnāt good enough so I ended up throwing the flip phone across the floor. I immediately regretted doing that. The exterior was scratched, but it fortunately still worked.
So if anything, cellular phones have taught me to be calmer on the phone. I certainly would never slam my iPhone 8.
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In stark contrast to the olden days, when a good whack was often the first step in troubleshooting both mechanical and electronic appliances.
Aaaayyyyyyy. 
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I have to admit, so am I, that and the New England Digital Synclavier II.
The Series II CMIās dual 6809 architecture was rather clever: the 6809 uses a square wave clock signal, and bus operations only take place on the second half of the clock period, hence, by inverting the clock to one processor, both could share the bus.
The Synclavier used its proprietary ABLE processor, which was very interesting: the ABLE was a so-called transport triggered architecture, which uses just a MOVE operation with source and destination operands, with control and arithmetic operations encoded as special destinations (i.e., no opcodes).
Iād say that the big difference between the two was philosophical - the Synclav was more expandable (and things like terminals were less integral, more of an accessory), more minicomputer-like, programmable in a PL/I variant, while Iād call the CMI more user-oriented and -friendly. Both were absolutely bleeding edge for their time, though, and take-out-a-mortgage-to-pay-for-it expensive.
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āIn the long run,ā he [Larry Fast] concludes, āI donāt think thereās anything, in theory, that an analog machine can do that a digital canāt.ā
At least he hedged his bets. Underline āin theoryā about seven times and I still agree, but practice is still differentā¦
Itās kind of funny to listen to some 100% digital electronic music from the 80s and read the musicians gushing about how āperfectā digital is, and yet it sounds almost objectively worse than their earlier analog works. Wendy Carlos is a big one there.
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