>>>Try explaining party lines. I double-dog-dare you. :)
>>
>>"You know the General tab on an MMO's in-game chat window? Whole
>>towns' phone service used to be basically that, except usually without
>>as many Nazis and Chinese gold farmers."
>
>That's an excellent example. Except the last video games I played
>were on an at Atari 5200. In the late '80s. (No judgement; video
>games just aren't my thing.)

I gathered from context that the challenge involved explaining the phenomenon to people who hadn't been born yet at the time you're talking about, anyway.

>(Explaining 50 years of Iron Man history over breakfast to my boys
>this morning might have me inna mood.)

Ye gods. I've been an Iron Man fan since issue #162 of the original series and I can't even imagine why you would want to do that, let alone actually do it. :)

>The Yooper town I grew up in only required using the last four digits
>of a phone number to dial within our prefix until at least '91.

Yup, my hometown did as well. The pay phones in town still had dials and Touch-Tone dialing wasn't available for residential customers until they changed over the local exchange's switchgear at around that same time, at which point we finally went to seven-digit local dailing.

I remember when I was a kid, calling my grandparents (or calling home from their house, when I was staying over)—we had direct dialing, but there was still about a 20-second delay between dialing and having it ring at the other end, during which you could hear the network constructing the circuit, switch by switch, exchange by exchange.

Phones also rang differently based on whether it was a local or long-distance call incoming. Local calls gave one long ring, pause, one long ring, while toll calls gave two short, pause, two short.

Here's a trick from those days I just remembered: if you picked up a phone in the old four-digit-local/dial phone days, dialed 987, and hung up, it would make all the extensions in the house ring. If you and, say, the person downstairs in the kitchen then picked up, you could have an intercom conversation.

(This is presumably the mechanism that the stalker used in When a Stranger Calls. "The calls are coming from inside the house!")

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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