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I love how we still talk about "dialing" phone numbers...

Princess AlicePrincess Alice
in General
...even though it's been literal decades since telephones had dials instead of keypads or touchscreens.
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  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    edited 2018-03-26 05:06:01
    meanwhile, we still click the 3.5" floppy diskette to save documents

    incidentally LibreOffice has tried to introduce an icon that's a down arrow with a flat rectangular block of computer equipment below it, to mean save

    it didn't catch on
  • TatterhoodTatterhood
    I had a dial phone in my house as a kid
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    I had a button phone that generated pulses, in my house, as a kid
  • Imipolex GImipolex G
    Touch the cow. Do it now.
    I think I did too

    Hard to remember
  • lee4hmzlee4hmz
    ⚠ THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
    Ah yes, I remember the tone/pulse switch and why it existed. For the longest time, pulse was the default and Touch-Tone was an extra-cost option, so when all-electronic phones started appearing in the 1980s, they gave you a switch to set which mode you wanted. (This also made it easier to use phone menus on a pulse line.)
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Actually I had two phones that could do pulse.  One of them had a tone/pulse switch.  The other was pulse-only, and it also had the distinctive feature that the button to hang up the phone was contained in the phone itself.  It was originally meant to be used with a tray containing fillable address cards, but you could take the handset out and use it by itself...which is what we did for many years after getting rid of said tray.
  • Princess AlicePrincess Alice
    You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
    I remember seeing the TONE ↔ PULSE switch on a lot of the phones my family had in the '90s, and not knowing what it meant.
  • CalicaCalica
    Sup bitches, witches, Haters, and trolls.
    Central Avenue said:

    I remember seeing the TONE ↔ PULSE switch on a lot of the phones my family had in the '90s, and not knowing what it meant.

    I could sort of guess what tone was because I could hear the beeps but had no idea what pulse was
  • CalicaCalica
    Sup bitches, witches, Haters, and trolls.
    Calica said:

    Central Avenue said:

    I remember seeing the TONE ↔ PULSE switch on a lot of the phones my family had in the '90s, and not knowing what it meant.

    I could sort of guess what tone was because I could hear the beeps but had no idea what pulse was
    And at some point after seeing rotary phones in TV I think I inferred that the pulse switch had something to do with it but didn't know more
  • lee4hmzlee4hmz
    ⚠ THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
    I understood what pulse did when I was younger because some of my relatives had dial phones, but the tone/pulse switch was a bit of a mystery until later, when I actually read the phone bill and saw that the phone company (I forget if it was Centel or GTE by the time I noticed) was charging extra for tone dialing.
  • BeeBee
    glennmagusharvey said:


    incidentally LibreOffice has tried to introduce an icon that's a down arrow with a flat rectangular block of computer equipment below it, to mean save

    Too easy to mistake for "download" icons.
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