DONALD KING dials up the telephone technology only a Luddite could love.
Don't you people have cell phones? (AP Photo)
If only you could find a good beeper repair shop, these might be spared from the obsolete technology pile. (AP Photo/Donald King)
As we say "Hello" in all new ways and from all new places with every leap forward in telephone technology, so do we say goodbye.
No doubt we all have elder relatives with cassette tapes in their answering machines. Perhaps those clunky contraptions are attached to a phone with metal bells that ring when struck by a tiny hammer.
Don't get too smug, friend. Is there a tiny antenna on your cell phone? Because those are all but gone, too.
With everything we gain, we lose a little more. Who can forget:
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LIVE OPERATORS
When the phone was fist invented, operators were a necessary part of the process. Who else was going to run the switchboard for you? Your line was manually connected to another, a process that sometimes repeated several times -- depending on whom you were trying to reach.
You're calling -- gasp! -- long distance?
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ROTARY PHONES
With automation came rotary phones, cutting out the middle-man. For its time, the rotary phone was a great invention, but it got tired fast. How long did you have to sit and watch that thing spin back? Woe to the person with lots of 9's and 0's in their number.
O, can't anything make this wretched dialing go faster?
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PUSH-BUTTONS
Touch-tone changed everything -- again. Instead of dialing, we pressed buttons. We also got speed-dial for the chronically impatient. The downside: Call centers learned quickly that computers could recognize these tones just as easily as an operator could say, "Thank you for calling Knox Oil and Gas, how may I direct your call?"
To continue reading in English, press 1.
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ANSWERING MACHINES
Who stays at home anymore? We're a mobile society, with mobile needs -- we can't sit around waiting for the phone to ring. Worried about missing a call? They soon had a machine for that, too. And wacky dads everywhere finally had their grand stage: How about a quick family rap? A few seconds of your favorite song? Having your 2-year-old tell everyone you're not home? It all became cliche.
Good thing those little tapes wore out.
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BEEPERS
Once the exclusive accessory of golfing doctors, the pager had a shockingly bright moment on center stage -- then quickly became sitcom fodder. Despite their portability and the pleasant sensation of your vibrating pocket, beepers required you to find a phone, and that was sometimes a challenge.
Which leads us to ...
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PHONE BOOTHS
Those private little boxes known as phone booths weren't without merits. They provided shelter from the rain, kept your conversations private and gave college students something to cram into. You could sit down, close the door and a light would come on -- automatically! Calls were a dime. Sometimes there was a book the size and weight of an anvil with every local number, right at your fingertips. But they died a slow death in the 80's, giving way to less-than-private kiosks, or in many cases, nothing at all.
Good thing for Superman that Starbucks took off as a business model.
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CAR PHONES
For the on-the-go executive who couldn't waste a moment pulling over to make a call, phones were installed in cars. But you didn't need big bucks to look like James Bond -- soon enough, fake car phone "antennas" were widely available (and used). While we associate them with the 1980s, car phones have been around early as 1947. Hey, at least they didn't ring in theaters.
Unless, of course, you were at the drive-in.
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Donald King as an asap photo editor based in New York.
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