"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1093199216k@trad...

In article writes:

And speaking of communication and "clicks and whirs"; the sight,
sounds (and even scents) of a big telephone central office implemented
in "Strowger switches" is another phenomenon lost to the digital
generation.

Heck, most people under 30 don't know why we say "dial" a phone number.

I have a couple of dial telephones stil in use here and it continues to
amaze me
that they still work for outgoing calls. I remember thinking that I was
cheating
the phone company when I wasn't paying the extra $3/month for Touch-Tone
service since I had only dial phones, but discovered that my modem worked
on the home line in the tone mode, so I used that. Then I got a second
line for
a BBS and specified (again) that it was dial-only. This line was on a
different
exchange than the house line and darn if the modem only dialed in pulse
mode.

In those days Touch-Tone was extra-$$ because it paid for the
little converter boxes they had to hang one each subscriber line
to convert the DTMF to dial pulses so that the old dial-only
switches would understand what number you were calling.
Presumably all the old dial-only switches have been replaced
by now with more modern solid-state, DTMF central-office
equipment.