this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
143 points (93.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35882 readers
1691 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
143
Phonebooks (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by WoahWoah@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
 

I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] radix@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] wallybeavis@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Rotary phones weren't even that long ago?!??! I still remember the swooop, click-click-click-click sound, oh, and the ear shattering ringing bells. I am happy that in our lifetime we've come so far that kids don't understand tools from just a couple decades ago. I remember my father showing me a stack of punch cards he used at work and warning me not to touch them - but what I also know is, that those kids better get the hell off my damn lawn!

[–] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 9 points 1 month ago

Fun fact: You could dial without even using the rotary. In a morse-code-like fashion, quickly click the hang-up knob the number you want with a pause in-between numbers. So if you were calling 558-9151 (remember 7 digit numbers‽), you'd do (c = click):

c-c-c-c-c

c-c-c-c-c

c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c

c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c

c

c-c-c-c-c

c

[–] illi@lemm.ee 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Man rotary phones were the best! Such a joy to dial.

[–] andrewrgross 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I had one in my room! Such a good feel to it. Same with picking up and hanging up!

This was in the early 2000s, btw. They were already relics, but landlines were still commonly used when I was in high school, and it had such a handsome look to it and felt great to use. I have long thought that a product that would do incredibly well would be a cell phone charging dock where you put your phone in and while it's charging it just acts like a landline rotary phone. The user experience is very, very gratifying, and if you've ever tried to hold a call while your phone is plugged into the wall you know how much better a solid headset with a coil wire would feel than that.

[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 month ago

Hey, they did a good job, and no one was being mean about it. That's nice.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would probably have similar difficulties... I can't even tell what they were doing wrong and then suddenly doing right. I do know the basic motion because I've seen it in shows I think, like you spin it around... but I never really thought about how precisely you do that. And you only had a certain amount of time to dial it?? That's crazy.

I will say I would have figured out you need to pick it up first sooner. But even my office phone I dial the number, see it on the little screen, hit send, and then lift up the receiver if I don't want to use speaker phone.

[–] andrewrgross 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They were starting by putting a finger in zero and then dragging to the number. And for zero they were dragging all the way to the stop.

You're supposed to dial by putting a finger in each number hole and then dragging to the stop. So they dialed zero correctly, but only zero.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

You're supposed to dial by putting a finger in each number hole and then dragging to the stop. So they dialed zero correctly, but only zero.

How do you do that with only five fingers?? I guess that makes sense that the was such little time to dial it. Like you put each finger in the holes and then spin the whole thing? How does it figure out which... wait, then how would you do repeated numbers? Or did numbers never repeat..? I'm confused.

[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You dialled by putting a finger in each number hole one at a time, dragging each one to the stop. When I was a kid our town's phone numbers had just four digits, didn't take long to dial.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Your number had what now?? Wow. Maybe you mean five? I was reading a Times article that they changed the four digit codes in 1930, but maybe that wasn't standardized across the country. I've learned more about phone history than I ever expected to in my life. 🤣

[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm from New Zealand originally. Small town in a small country. The time zone joke back then was, "If it's 5pm in Sydney, it's 1956 in Auckland."

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I love that, I might need to tweak that for personal use. 😍

[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, do it sequentially. To dial 515-2400 you put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 1, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 2, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 4, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 0, drag it to the stop, then release. Finally put your finger in the 0 again, drag it to the stop, then release.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

OMG. Why would they put a timer on it then?? That seems like it would take forever.

[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It did take forever. Rotary phones work by sending clicks down the phone line that automation equipment listens to. If clicks came too fast the equipment wouldn’t understand it correctly. This was one of the big improvements the touch tone phone brought: it was much faster to dial. Instead of clicks each button generated a tone at a specific frequency and the automated switching equipment could interpret it much faster. At least some of the early phones had a switch to make them send clicks instead, in case the local phone company didn’t support tones yet.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Oh WOAH. You just made me understand wtf is going on with the payphone in the scene at the beginning of War Games! He was making the clicks by hanging it up repeatedly. You just unlocked a memory of me and my dad, he loved that movie. That as well as what was going on in that scene! I can't believe that scene came back to me right now and connected to what you were saying.

Apparently my brain wanted to know how that worked while my conscious brain didn't really think about it much other than "huh." At the time. My dad did make me watch it like five times though.

[–] Rhoeri@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago

You mean to say you’ve never even seen a move with someone using a rotary phone?