Touch tone phones (DTMF) were first deployed at scale in the US in 1963, but they would have been in development at the Bell System for quite a while before that. Possibly also some limited deployments. This ad from 1956 teases a future without rotary dials.
DTMF also led to the rise of Blue Boxes and Phreaking.
It is kinda weird to see an overall accurate future prediction be dated.
“Thank you for calling Customer Service. If you are calling from a touch-tone phone, please press one now. If you are using a rotary dial phone, please stay on the line and an operator will assist you momentarily.”
*pulse dials 1 on the touch-tone phone*
“We also provide customer service through our website where you can chat with an AI 24/7.”
The last one:
I love that they thought we’d want something less comfortable to hold with more empty space. Brilliant.
By the time the real DTMF phones appeared, they did get the the keypad into the base, so the handset part was still slim. Not sure if that was all of them, or just some models. But it looked like so:
Chunky and satisfying, like banana bread
Those things made an impressive noise when Russell Crowe used them
DTMF - dial tone, motherfucker?
DTMF - dual-tone modulated fone
Dual tone multiple frequency
That’s the version Sam Jackson gets.
Seen plenty worse shaped phones back in the day. I don’t think they were wrong.
I also love how corporations always fail to predict the future and think people want complex overdesigned stuff, instead of simple and functional things.
We had tons of phones that eventually looked like that future phone more or less. That was 30 years before this phone was everywhere.
Also people used their shoulders to hold phones while the took notes with a pad and pen. So thicker phones were a thing. They had plastic banana shaped things on the smaller handsets.
But were they advertised as the future, or did people just choose them to be the future?
It’s not exactly the same, but it’s close to the one in the ad.
I grew up in a house with what I thought were rotary phones that looked like this, with the dial on the wall mount, but I can’t find any pictures. I know they were rotary, but I’m guessing I don’t remember the handset correctly. One of them was this color! The other was a darker brown. We did a bunch of work to the house in the mid 90s, but kept one of them. It caused a lot of problems when my folks switched from dial-up internet to DSL. They had to get rid of it.
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There were also rotary phones with keypads for a while.
When you pressed a key, you would hear a “dit, dit, dit” sound (for 3 as an example). My first phone in my room was a hand me down that worked that way.
Wow, I don’t think I ever saw one of those! The first phone I had in my room was a touch tone I made from a kit haha. It was just a handset, I don’t remember how the hook worked. Maybe it had an on/off switch?
I made a phone kit too later and it wasn’t a real dual tone phone either actually.
When you pressed the 9 button, it just sent 9 pulses at 10 pulses a second.
Could I date my sexy bowling pin future phone?!
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What? No musk neural chip?
