Your first phone?

[jon-nyc]

@bachophile said:

had this next to my bed growing up

Looks like a direct line to the Kremlin or something.

[jodi]

We had a rotary on the wall phone, and then when the push buttons came out my dad thought it would be cool to put a blue princess push bottom phone on the 1960’s blue toilet in the bathroom. We had a black rotary phone with a little twist button and two phone lines at my stepfathers house.

[mark]

#1

[Mik]

[Doctor Phibes]

[Nunatax]

A.k.a. my ‘brick’

[Tom-K]

Yea I had the same phone as Bach except in black. It came fully equipped with an answering machine called, "Mom."

[jon-nyc]

I really meant first cell phone. Of course we all had the Western Electric model 500. The phone company issued them to us our parents. We didn’t even own them back then.

[jon-nyc]

@bachophile said:

had this next to my bed growing up

A phone in your room?

Spoiled kid. That explains a lot.

[xenon]

Personally - number 7

[Mik]

@jon-nyc said:

I really meant first cell phone. Of course we all had the Western Electric model 500. The phone company issued them to us our parents. We didn’t even own them back then.

Of course you did. And we knew that. But this is TNCR.

[Axtremus]

@jon-nyc said:
The phone company issued them to us our parents. We didn’t even own them back then.

My parents owned rotary phones, but I owned wall-mounted touchstone phones myself. I was already living on my own at the time, so I owned the wall-mounted phones, not my parents. I also owned DECT phones, "cordless" yet "not wireless."

[jon-nyc]

Here they didn't allow you to own your own rotary phones until the 80s for most people, though in some areas you could do it in the late 70s. For decades ma bell wouldn't allow devices they didn't own to be connected. You were forced to rent them.

[Doctor Phibes]

@jon-nyc said:

Here they didn't allow you to own your own rotary phones until the 80s for most people, though in some areas you could do it in the late 70s. For decades ma bell wouldn't allow devices they didn't own to be connected. You were forced to rent them.

It was the same in the UK. You had to rent them from the Post Office who ran the service until it was privatised in the 1980s. We had a party line - shared with a neighbour

[jon-nyc]

Well yeah you lived in a 3rd world country.

Actually we had party lines but they were mostly gone by the 60s.

[taiwan_girl]

I remember the blackberry. Used to play brick breaker (or whatever it was called) a lot. LOL. Thought it was the coolest thing to get email on the phone.

(now I realize maybe that was not such a good thing. LOL)

[jon-nyc]

The original version was just for email. The first time o saw one was in 1999 at Nasdaq. Their CIO carried one. He was always testing new technologies. I remember they had a pilot project where they sent stock quotes over TV signals using the channel designed to carry closed caption information.

[Axtremus]

@jon-nyc said:

I remember they had a pilot project where they sent stock quotes over TV signals using the channel designed to carry closed caption information.

Teletext?

[jon-nyc]

Yes.

[Doctor Phibes]

@jon-nyc said:

The original version was just for email. The first time o saw one was in 1999 at Nasdaq. Their CIO carried one. He was always testing new technologies. I remember they had a pilot project where they sent stock quotes over TV signals using the channel designed to carry closed caption information.

Yeah, so we had that in the UK in the 1970's, it was called Ceefax. But you shit-hole country colonial types took a while to catch up.