Pulled Coupling Caps

[eschertron]

This isn't the future I signed up for.

I'm stealing this for a song lyric.

[Enzo]

Here is my take on the current trend of having one's nose buried in a smart phone everywhere we go, constantly thumbing messages to god knows where.

People are "hanging out at the mall" without having to actually be at the mall.

[Chuck H]

It wasn't that long ago the phone was tethered to the wall and the handset to the phone by cords. And we had to "dial" the damn things. You didn't even want to call people with too many zero's or nine's in their number because if you slipped you'd need to start over! I wonder if anyone under the age of forty even knows what "dialing a phone number" actually means!?! Anyway... With this background I'm not interested in a phone "smarter" than I am.

[Enzo]

There is a little moment in one of those "Scary Movie" episodes. The movies are spoofs. At some point some emergency occurs, and the bimbo runs to the phone to call 911. It is an old dial phone. She is baffled, she keeps poking her finger into the 9 and 1 holes. I love it.

Nowdays phone numbers like 9999 or 0000 are popular. Back in the dial days I hated numbers like that because they took so long to dial. When they came up with "touch tone" oh that was exciting.

My grandmother lived in a small Appalachian town with short numbers, and I remember her asking the operator to connect her. The ffolks there hadn't yet accepted that the phone made it all the way across town through the wires, so most of them shouted into the phone. You could hear the other person from the earpiece while it was across the room.

Today we have a dial tone that is a dual tone around 440Hz. Before the dial tones were just a buzz, like 60Hz, though I suspect it was more likely 120 or higher. When it converted from Buzz to the modern Boooo, it was exciting.


I bet you are right, a lot don;t know why we say dialing a phone when it is really buttons pushed.

Now good luck finding a pay phone.

I went to Michigan State, over 40,000 students, and over half of them lived in the dorms. Every dorm room had a phone on the wall by the bathroom door. They just got rid of them. The cost of maintaining thousands of phones that almost no one used anymore was substantial, so last year they took them out. The wiring remains, and if you WANT a land line, you can request one. But default is no phone

On campus you dial only the last five digits to get to another campus number. To get off campus, dial 9 then the full number. Freshman year, my dorm room phone was 353-5171, so on campus 35171 got to my phone. Unfortunately there was a new pizza company in town, very popular. It was Dominos Pizza. Their number was 351-7100. Now if you were in a dorm and called to order a pizza and forgot to dial a 9... Yep, it rang my room.

[trem]

I still say....."I'm sorry, I dialed the wrong number."

[km6xz]

The old dial phones were never owned, only leased so having a phone in the house was relatively expensive compared to other things like a load of bread of $0.18-25 for a gallon of gas in 1965. Any kid who played around with electronics or electricity probably learned the hard way that the ringing current, 20 hz could knock them on their butt. Growing up, we had our own line, but most people in the neighborhood had 2 party line and when living in a rural area, everyone had up to 8 homes sharing the same wire pair party line. Later systems had individual rings for each home, 2 short and a long for example was the Smiths down the road and 1 short, and long was the old woman who listed to every call for anyone. Sometimes if the neighbors were nosy, you would here a muted shift in level as each listener picked up to listen and if more than 4-5 were in use, the line would sometimes disconnect.

Remember the Blue Boxes and phone hacking?

What was be amazing to people now if going back to that time from the 40s to about 1970, was that if you called a home, someone would answer, they were home most of the time. Now, it is useless to call a landline. Here, I have a landline but do not even remember the number. I have never gotten a call on it. The whole society changed overnight it seemed. Here, it happened in less than a year in 2002-3 when cell phones reached a critical mass so suddenly no one was home. That exploded the craze for sushi, pubs, coffee shops and filling life with out of the home activities. Before 2000, a woman with a cell phone was considered unfavorably since people claimed only hookers had cell phones. By 2005, it was said that children need to have a phone by age 7.

[Enzo]

yeah, used to be the phone company provided the phones, and you were not supposed to connect anything of your own to the lines. You could opt for a fancier phone, like the princess phone, and pay an extra buck or two a month for it. Then touch tone happened, and they charged you an extra dollar or two per month just to have it, plus the instrument rental.

Then the law determined the phone company could not require you only buy phones from them, and then the retail. phone industry was born. You could also BUY a phone from the phone company. MY dad figured out the monthly on their phone versus purchase and decided that the monthly would have paid for an owned phone in less than a year. So we called the phone company and told them we wanted to buy our phone instrument. The touch phone we had had was a nice heavy sturdy one. The phone company sent a guy out to retrieve their nice heavy one and gave us the one we purchased, which was much lighter weight. NO doubt theirs would last 30 years, I doubt the owner one would. But it did work reliably, I'll give them that.

[Chuck H]

Before 2000, a woman with a cell phone was considered unfavorably since people claimed only hookers had cell phones. By 2005, it was said that children need to have a phone by age 7.

Did the number of 7yo hookers increase?

[Gtr_tech]

I think the waning interest in the electronics hobby has greatly contributed to electronics supply stores falling off the map. When we hit the 80s and computers started consuming the geek sector's interest, the electronics hobby was doomed and steadily declined. Some exceptions of course, but you can't sell too much product to the minority. I'm lucky that I have 2 local suppliers near me. Fulton's in Lansing and EPS in Flint. EPS now owns Fulton so if I want to pick up parts in Flint and they don't have them there but they do at Fulton, I can have them transferred and get them next day. Plus EPS has a huge "junk room" in the back where all kinds of oddball things can be had. There's even a large stockpile of tubes (mostly NOS) but they have been cherry picked for the most part. I did fish out some 6GM5s to replace 7868s, some nice 6V6s, and a few other things. No Mullard EL34s or RCA 6L6s tho. Someone made off with most of the audio tubes some time ago...

[Leo_Gnardo]

Before 2000, a woman with a cell phone was considered unfavorably since people claimed only hookers had cell phones. By 2005, it was said that children need to have a phone by age 7.

Did the number of 7yo hookers increase?

Well, I dunno but in relation to my theory about Tamagotchi being the training ground for future pocket-pal slaves, read this from Wikipedia:

< On August 3, 2005, South Australian MP Nick Xenophon attempted to ban the Tamagotchi Connection Version 2 (or at least have it classified R18+) due to the "Slot" game featured on it, fearing that it would make children grow up to become the "gambling addicts of tomorrow" >

Gambling- HA! - the least of our worries. I think the honorable MP was on to something, just focusing too closely on one aspect. The Generation of Inattention is upon us. And has been for at least 15 years. Not just younger folks either. Seen plenty of 60+ types who got hip to their plastic pals & now just as lost-in-space as any youngster.

Xenophon, interesting surname. Wonder if he's descended from the Xenophons of Xanadu.

Gotta stop now & see if I have any new friends of Farcebook, see ya!

[Enzo]

I think Gtr_tech is right that the loss of electronics as a hobby has hastened the passing of parts stores. But I think stores like Fultons mainly lived off the TV/VCR repair shops in the area. Fultons is on the south side of town, while we used to also have Wedemeyer Electronics on the northeast corner. (BY Frandor) I'd be in there buying parts all the time 30 years ago. My repair biz was small potatoes. I'd be at the counter while one of their guys was filling an order for TV channel 6 across the street. Those guys would buy hundreds of feet of TV camera cable and also the fancy multipin connectors for same by the hundred. PLus industrial sales to Michigan state Univ as well as General motors. But even if individuals was only 5% or 10%, a loss of that can mean the difference between a loss or a profit.

I grew up learning electronics for my hobby of radio. I enjoyed short wave, I was into DXing (DX means distance - how faqr away can you pick up a signal is the game). I built antenna amplifiers and preselectors and other things. SHort wave let us communicate with people all over the world. There are still a lot of amateur radio people, but if the average young soul wants to talk to someone on the other side of the world, hell, he can do it from his smart phone sitting in class while ignoring his teacher. No need to build something and climb trees to string antenna wires. In th hobby magazines there were all manner of projects. There were electronics ignitions for your car. Gadgets for your phone - the one that plugged into the wall, remember? Maybe a simple home security system. Today there is no need for those things. Good luck improving your cars ignition system with a few transistors. What gadget could you build today for your phone that every teenager doesn't already have built into his cell phone?

Other hobby gadgets were maybe a thing with LEDs on it that made random yes/no decisions for you. Today you can have Siri on your smart phone and ask questions into the phone and get answers. For the hobby to work, you have to wind up with something you would want when you are done. Here we build amps, that works. But we are a tiny little corner of electronics.

QUick, make up a list of five things someone could build for himself that would be interesting more than 5 minutes...

[The Dude]

The whole "lack of anything interesting to build" point is well taken, However, for me and I expect for many, it's not necessarily about building something interesting. The real joy and sense of accomplishment comes from finishing a project and knowing that you built it or fixed it yourself. It doesn't necessarily have to be some horribly useful device.

For example, I still remember getting an electronics kit for Christmas when I was a kid. The first project I built was a simple AM radio. I already had a couple of store bought portable radios, so I wasn't building it because I wanted a radio. I built it because I was interested in knowing how it worked and what made it work. I wanted to know how a pile of parts could be stuck together to make something useful. I learned a lot from that kit and from there I went to getting old electronics from anywhere I could (rummage sales, garbage cans, etc.) and figuring out how to fix things. Most of the electronic devices I have owned and own still to this day I have acquired broken and figured out how to fix them including most all of my household electronics (TV, stereo, etc.).

Had I not gotten that kit for Christmas, who knows......?

[52 Bill]

QUick, make up a list of five things someone could build for himself that would be interesting more than 5 minutes...

I can list some, but I can already buy them at the local dollar store.

[Enzo]

Dude, I started out the same way, I got a crystal radio kit about 1954 that started me. There is always pride of accomplishment. Build a radio, turn it on, it ACTUALLY WORKS!!! Now build a thing with 10 LEDs on it that blink in sequence. IT WORKS, but... so what? SOmething like a radio, at least you can take it out on the porch and listen to music or the game, just to appreciate that you made the thing. Lacking that untility, even it not a needed one, seriously saps any interest. It isn't just us, the enginering community laments the loss of electronics hobby, because that is what gets a lot of us interested in engineering later in life. We need to find things that might actually interest kids in electronics.

[JHow]

...but most people in the neighborhood had 2 party line and when living in a rural area, everyone had up to 8 homes sharing the same wire pair party line. Later systems had individual rings for each home, 2 short and a long for example was the Smiths down the road and 1 short, and long was the old woman who listed to every call for anyone. Sometimes if the neighbors were nosy, you would here a muted shift in level as each listener picked up to listen and if more than 4-5 were in use, the line would sometimes disconnect....

Yes, we had a party line in rural Virginia. Back then if anyone was listening to your call it was likely your neighbor. Now it's just the NSA.