Sarah
Your first phone? Do you remeber what was your first phone and when did you buy it? How did it look like?
24 gru 2017 20:18
Komentarze · 11
2

Motorola. I don’t remember a model. I was one of the first in my school who had a cell phone.

It was soooooo big and heavy but it could survive in any circumstances.

I think first cell phones  would have been used instead of a hammer 8-D

25 grudnia 2017
2
Oh, I referred to "the" telephone company, and I meant "the." In the United States, early in the century, a visionary named Theodore Vail managed to convince... the Federal government? all of the states? that telephone service was "a natural monopoly," and that it would be best to have one single telephone company providing "universal service." When my parents lived in Mexico City for a year in the 1940s, they were fascinated because at that time Mexico City had two competing telephone companies, and all businesses had to have two telephones on their desk so that they could talk to customers on either system. The situation of a single nationwide telephone company persisted until the 1970s.
25 grudnia 2017
2

Jerry has me beat. My first was this one--note, the one on the left, model 302AW, without a dial:

http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/images/302set.gif

Of course (of course?) my parents did not buy it. In the 1950s, in the United States, it was not possible to own your own handset. You paid for telephone service, the instrument was included, and you had either none or very little choice about what kind of instrument it was. In the 1960s the telephone company choose to make available a handful of different colors, and a second, more compact, "Princess" phone. You could not buy those, either; if you wanted a phone that wasn't black, you said so, and you then paid an extra $0.50 per month... forever.

As a child, I would pick up the telephone, and I would hear the voice of a human operator saying "Number, please." In what I think was "correct" pronunciation of the 1920s, they pronounced it as two syllables, PLEE-uhz, even though everyone else pronounced it as one syllable, pleez. I would then say my neighbor's number--"Scarsdale 3-####"--and she (it was always a she) would connect me. Normally, you could only call people in the same town as you. Anything else was long distance, which was a very big deal and very expensive--several dollars per minute, which would be equivalent to something like $40/minute today.

When I was about nine or ten, they introduced dial phones--phones with the rotary dials which you've probably seen in movies, which explains why, to this day, we speak of "dialing a phone" or "dialing a number." Touch-tone (pushbutton) phones were slowly and gradually introduced and by the 1980s dial phones were almost gone. For years I kept an old dial phone as a souvenir, and the telephone system still worked with it.

25 grudnia 2017
1
Thank you Natalia.  You made me laugh )))
25 grudnia 2017
1
Thank you Jerry...What a funny picture of that telephone))))
Nobody had an old Motorola?))))
25 grudnia 2017
Pokaż więcej