There's been lots of "before cell/smartphones" chatter on Reddit, this week. Blows my damn mind that there's more than one generation who can't fathom living in the dark ages like we (and others before us) did.

I was just shooting the shit with my Gen X husband about this stuff. I had somehow legitimately half forgotten about talking to directory assistance or operators back in the day, until a recent post helped jog my memory. (Those ladies had god-damned superpowers, I swear. They could get you information about people and places with just the barest breadcrumb of information/help from you. It was amazing, helpful, and appreciated.) This did get me to wondering, abstractly, about how much other everyday mundane stuff I've forgotten because it's been irrelevant for so long; but I digress.

My guy has been a computer guy (and still working IT) since the Apple II+ hit the scene. ($1,200 back then, $4,700 by 2025 metrics.) And yup, he knows how lucky he was to have access to that kind of technology back in those days. I never had access to such things outside of school. Never been particularly techy. But I appreciate/admire stuff, even if I don't understand it. Well, I did for the longest time, anyway. I'm in my 40's, now, so the newest technology tends to strike me as being against the natural order of things. (Little nod to Douglas Adams, there. 🤣)

So I know this may be known to many of you, but I wanted to ramble about it in case it's stuff maybe you've forgotten (like me) or possibly never knew in the first place, if you're not super tech savvy. (Also me.) And heck, maybe some youngsters might wander across our lawn, see this, and get a kick out of it.

(Please note that this is my retelling of second hand info that I only just leaned exsisted, so if I miss the mark, by all means, call me out or ask me to try and get clarification from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.)

Tidbit One: Mr. Tech was telling me that once upon a time there was a local number you could dial. Said number varried depending on your specific location. If you called the number, you would get a dial tone. Once you heard that you would hit the hook switch once. The dial tone on the other end would become noticeably higher pitched... That was your prompt to hang up. Once you hung up, if your system was connected properly your phone would ring. This was used for testing. It wasn't always feasible to ask someone else to call you from an outside number.

Two: When you dialed a rotary phone you would hear the pulse clicks/tones coming back to you as the wheel unwound. This could be simulated by tapping the hook switch however many number of times you needed the system to recognize. (If you needed to dial 3 you would tap the hook three times.) Not something that needed to be used, frequently, but back in the day there were occasionally "receiver only" type handsets... I'm not sure how common these were. I believe I myself only ever saw a couple of them in person over the years. They were just a phone with a receiver and no wheel for dialing for incoming calls, only. But you could make an outgoing call via the method mentioned above.

Three: Phreakers were the hackers of telecommunications systems. They learned how to mimic the tones, etc. and could manipulate call routing in a way that screwed the phone companies out of long distance fees or any number of other charges.

Last, but quite interesting to me because of the punchline: When my husband was in charge of setting up multiple phone lines, like for an office, he'd sometimes need to check the wiring coming into a building. Figure out what the heck that specific line was. You could dial 1-800-444-4444 and the system on the other end (affiliated with the long defunct MCI) would tell you the telephone number that belonged to that line. Here's where THAT gets fun: It. Still. Works. With the "Thank you for calling MCI" message and all. And it rattled back his cell number to us. I don't have the words to describe the delight I felt at discovering this little trifle.