I bet Maine has them beat.

Kentucky womps all of the above, anybody from there will agree, way stone age.
Hell they are still trying to figure out how to use voicemail and return a call, drove me batshit crazy.

Well at least a farmer in the UK was able to build himself a 4GLTE cell receiver tower. It has PV panels to charge a batter that powers the 4G LTE receiver. Then transmits it over fiber to his house about 300 meters away.

[Link: dailymail.co.uk]

KOT

"Can you tell me why this dang light is flashing on my phone?".



I'll have to tell you about the time we rented a house, it came with phone service, and that was a party line.

Nothing short of hilarious....

When and where was this? Just curious if party lines were still around after the turn of the century.

KOT

Back in the late 70's my aunts and uncles on the farms in South Dakota still had party lines, but we are talking out in the sticks big time.

Being its Kelly, he's probably talking about when Alex still ran the switchboard himself.

My grandparents still had a party line well into the early to mid 90's. Then after that, it wasn't until after the turn of the century could the phone company handle touch tone.

The house is located on W Paletown Road in Quakertown, PA. If you look on a map, you'll see it's with in a mile or two of RT 309. The houses on the road have been there for very long time too. So it's not like that the road got populated late or anything. The only major development on the road happened after the touch tone was allowed.

Here's the funny thing. The house now has Verizon Fios. Yet my house in Ledyard don't have U-Verse, or whatever our new telephone company calls it. Despite the fact there's a fiber cable 3 houses away, has been since the 70's.

KOT

I had to look up what this party line stuff was all about...and I started off using rotary telephones. It's weird that you were only able to call people on the same line and listen in on each other and have no communication with the rest of the world. I do recall interesting features on the rotary phone we would use such as dialing 1166 for continuous redial if the other party was busy, 1169 for last call return, and I believe 1171 was for a three way call. This was back when people actually made plans with each other AND showed up; none of this last minute texts of "hey I'm running late" or "I'm not going to make it".

That was it!

If he was drunk it would have been filled with typo's and made even less sense!

I'm far from the narrow minded group that you portrayed me to be.

I'm glad that it is finally legal here.

It causes far fewer problems than the over consumption of alcohol.

It's welcome at my backyard get-together's.

I do however choose not to partake because it puts me straight to sleep.

When i was a teenager "Party Line" was a phone number that you dialed into to hear a hundred other people trying to talk over each other. You would try to get a girl to call you off the party line by shouting your phone number out. Then you would get a dozen prank calls. I have a friend who met his wife on the party line 25 years ago.

My mother is 60 and has talked about having party lines when she was a kid. She said everyone had a phone number, but no one knew what they were, they picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect them like on Andy Griffith. They knew the operator and called her by name just like Andy.

I know a guy that worked for our local phone company back when they were still building out service in our section of the Appalachians. This would have been around the 50's maybe even some early 60's. I asked him once about the party lines and he said they could put I believe 6 houses (I think) on one line. They identified calls by different rings. But what I've still never figured out and never asked him to explain more, somehow the they could flip tip and ring for 6 more houses and double the number of houses on a single copper pair.

And yet you just made a comment. An interesting one, and it was really good that you joined in.
Thanks.
Don't be so freakin' judgmental -- you never know when something you find boring might actually turn out to be fun. Just add remotecentral folks and it will become a party unless people are curing each other out!


Which century? We're too soon into the 21st Century to automatically think of the 20th Century as "the previous century," so suddenly "turn of the century" is the can-can in Paris previous to THAT turn of the century, or it "party till 1999" ! !


That can't be, otherwise no calls to the Big City would be possible. I'm pretty sure the operator's function was to connect one party line with whatever line another person had, which was, often, party line to party line.


That's wonderful! I don't recall any of that. My phone experiences started as a young'un in the mid 50s. When I got technical, I could dial 2112345 on any phone line and a Telco recording would tell me the phone number I was on... this was a valuable resource in the 80s!

In Chicago in the early 90's there was a number that did this. It's how we learned the call back number for pay phone before everyone had caller ID. The reason this was important to us is that i would get the payphones number then send a page to someone (all my friends had pagers) with that number and they could get to a phone and call me back at the payphone.

For us youngin'. There was only one turn of the century that we've gone through.

KOT