In the era of rotary phones, some businesses (and others) would put simple locks on the dial to prevent them from being rotated far enough to actually dial calls. However, a "practiced" caller could effectively "dial" calls by tapping the hook switch (aka switch hook) with the proper timing to emulate the dial. This was a common "phone phreak" skill. Or, uh, so I'm told.
@Okanogen Sure, IMTS was much fun with rotary dialing! Of course earlier systems depended on operator connections and weren't self-dial. Those go way back.
@lauren
I had an acquaintance in LA who had a vintage rotary phone in her vintage car (1985?)
and that was so cool.
There used to be a person here in Minnesota with a huge phone collection. Sought after as movie props, but now 3d printing and cgi is probably replacing that.
@lauren In the USA, you only had to learn to tap out the number 10 (0) and then ask the operator to place a station-to-station call for you. Or so I’ve heard.
What is that odd 2600-Hz tone I’m hearing?
@lauren Ralston-Purina may have paid for many long-distance calls home from the pay phone in the college dorm I lived in in 1980. Except for the ones paid for by the phone company because they had left a pair active but not connected to a room on the 66-block in the storage room in the basement, and there just happened to be an old bakelite desk phone with bare wires that could be easily connected, even without a punch down tool.
Or, so I’ve heard.
@lauren I suspect that many large companies had a WATS number for their staffs in those days. Ralston-Purina’s was popular because it required just a 4-digit “authorization code.” From the success rate from random guessing, it appeared that they had over a thousand valid codes. Or so I’ve heard.
@lauren
When I was in college, a bunch of us got together to rent a phone so we could make our long distance calls home to our parents. It sat in the hallway outside one of our rooms that had a jack. We had a lock on it and we all had keys so no one else could use it. Too bad (or luckily) we had no idea about your technique for getting around the lock.
Anyway, thanks for dredging up a 50-year-old memory.
@lauren fun fact. The emergency number in Germany is 112. So people put the lock in the 2 (which let you only dial 1s and 2s) to allow you to still make emergency calls. In any case you could not make a distance phone call as that required a leading 0. And a 0 is the farthest on the dial as it was encoded with ten pulses.
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