@Edent Oh, classic! The Internet is basically a giant, chaotic playground for information, cat videos, and arguments you never knew you wanted to have. More seriously, it’s for connecting people, sharing knowledge, entertainment, work, and, occasionally, helping you remember why you walked into a theatre in the first place.

@Edent Pr0n!

@Edent my favourite show, and I'm unrepentant in that.

@Edent Just slightly jealous! A fabulous show!

@Edent Enjoy! Love that show!

@neil hah

/actual way back when #PhonePhreak checking in

Dialing from one floor to another routing the call via Japan gave a nice two second delay.

@neil
all yes, does this make me old?

@neil Yep. Every one of them.

@neil I've done all of those though there's an obvious reason for that 🙂

@neil I grew up in a house with a rotary phone long after most people already had button phones. It confused the heck out of my friends when they tried to use it. :D

@neil yes to 1,4,5 and 7 but i am 75 (nearly 76 ) so i grew up with these things.

@neil

New Mastodon Poll Reveals 87% of Mastodonians Are Old AF

@neil

What I’m learning is that I am likely to crumble to dust soon.

@neil

I not only spoke to a telephone operator, I WAS one (at a car dealership). So was my wife - that's where we met.

@neil all but the phone card and exchange

@neil You could just have asked how old we are 😂

@neil I did all, Am I so old 🤔😱🤪😂😂

@neil Most of these. Not sure about the phone card. I don't *think* so, but I'm not entirely sure.

I've talked to operators but I don't think been routed from one system to another, unless this includes dialling 9 to dial out, or being forwarded by a receptionist?

Never received a phone call in a phone booth, but used to use them regularly to call parents as a child and teenager.

@neil all of the above

@neil
My auntie was a switchboard operator on a joint operations air base during The War, she had to speak English AND American.

@neil ha unfortunately I still remember my ATT phone card number

@neil I have also used a pay phone on a train.

@neil used a telephone book for which purpose?

@neil I am curious what it means to dial from one exchange to another.

I probably only called local numbers as a kid and dialing other areas when I was older was always just preceding the number with a 4 or 5 digit area code, did it work differently before?

@neil Yes to all, plus for a summer I actually was a (human) telephone operator. Those overnight shifts were something else.

@neil

if you said yes to more than two of these, you're overdue to schedule your next colonoscopy... :)

(which reminds me...)

@neil Most I'm not sure what "Dialled from one exchange to another" means specifically, maybe a UK thing?

I did buy this bad boy new in box from my local thrift store last week. I have a Bluetooth dongle in my house so that I can make calls with it. Fake dialtone and everything!

Alt...

an old beige AT&T Trimline phone with manual. It has a curly cord and everything.

@neil and made free international calls, by a number of methods.

@neil "Were you alive 40 years ago?" :)

@neil I've done all but two (reversed charges & dialed from one exchange to another).

I am an old.

@neil

7 out of 8 boxes ticked. <sigh>

@neil when I was a teenager, we all used to hang around at a park on a corner by a phone box. Our mums all had the phone number of that phone box so they could ring us and let us know when it was time to come home for tea.

@neil I've received a call on a pay phone exactly once. It wasn't for me, the box was just ringing so I answered it. The caller asked for Sarah. I said "sorry, nobody carried Sarah lives here" and they rather surprised me by asking "are you sure?"

@neil I still have the last phone book that was delivered here, maybe 15 years ago now. Probably not much good for anything other than holding up a potted plant.

@neil Yes I know, I'm feeling old!

@neil Stop reminding me I'm old, will ya?

All but one of the above. I never did the exchange thingy. But the rest, yeah, in my early teens.

And only reverse charged my parents, with their agreement in advance!

@neil I'm still using a rotary dial phone. Its in daily use.

@neil It used to be expensive to make calls outside your area code!

@neil All of the above!

I'd also throw in "Used a payphone for free using a tone generator" and "avoided long distance fees using a DISA system" 😀

@neil
Never reversed charges because always had emergency 2p/5p/10p/BT phonecard to use. #BePrepared

@neil Proud to say yes to every single one. ***And*** made long distance calls when they could only be connected by a human operator!!

Bonus points - a two-party phone line!!

@neil

I feel like I occupy the demographic category "dust" when I read this. I've done most of them.

@neil We had no phone for quite a while. When the phone line came through the valley, we were on party line with a few households on it. The phone was a big black thing; no dial, just a crank on the side. We were two longs and a short. Anyone (or everyone) in the group could listen to any conversation. For numbers outside the group, we did one long ring and asked Mona Ingram to connect us...

@neil
I actually worked a switchboard for the military. One of my favourite jobs.

@neil Why yes, I am GenX. Why do you ask? Also, you missed "made a collect call from a pay phone."

@neil
Hey, I'm older than the internet 😉😂

@neil Trying to make me feel old. Must try harder.

@neil Yeah, 100% =)

@neil phone books are boring. Have you ever used a Criss-Cross or City Directory?

@neil There's a bell-curve graph here with age as the X-axis. The younger you are, the fewer of these things you've done. As you get to older folks, there's more and more things they've done. And then as you approach even older folks who can't remember which of them they've actually done, the graph curves back down towards 0.

@neil My grand parents refused to stop using their rotary dial phone untill the Dutch telecom operator (the now defunct PTT) gave them a dial tone phone because they kept crashing the local exchange that couldn’t handle the ticking anymore. Resulting in a cascading failure.

@neil ~ In the US, we could dial 555-1212 and get the correct time

@neil None of the above.
I feel like I've been wasting my life...

@neil

- [X] Bypassed having to pay at a pay-phone by shorting out the receiver

@neil

I remember that I had this plastic card with information from a phone operator

I could go to a pay phone and
* Call a central
* Input a long customer number
* Input a code
* Input a phone number I wanted to call

And the charge of the call was sent to my parents phone bill.

@neil Full house! What do I win?

@neil Full house!

@neil This is just another way of saying 'Are you old?'

@neil “I have a collect call from Bob We’adababieetsaboi.”

@neil Also, I’ve used Mondex to withdraw cash onto a cash smart card using a pay phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

And I’ve made a call TO a pay phone/phone box.

@neil

Are you trying to implement an age certification procedure ?

🤪

@neil Okay, this poll has made me feel REALLY old.

@neil Got my first STD* in a phone box...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_trunk_dialling

@neil HOUSE!

@neil

Real life story: I was a student and on my way for a job interview. I got lost and ended up in at the bus terminal. There was a phone box there so I tried to call the potential employer but when I put a coin in the hole, about 30$ in 25cents went out! 😆

I'll never forget the winning sensation... 🤣✌️

@neil The Olympic marathoner Don Kardong, in his later career as a reporter, once failed to gain access to the press truck at the Boston Marathon. He compensated by going out the day before the marathon and writing down the numbers of a series of phone booths along the course, then calling them from his hotel room during the race and, if anyone picked up, asking them to describe what was going on. The resulting article was titled "Thirty Phone Booths To Boston".

@neil I dislike how hold this makes me feel

@neil never done any of those... So i cant vote :D

@neil I learned Spin Physics by learning rotary phone, by rote.

@neil We could often lift up the receiver and hear somebody else's conversation. Exciting times (sort of). Crossed lines innit.

@neil Tell me your relative age without telling me your relative age.

@neil specifically, I made many calls *to* public phone boxes, because it was the only way to make a call to my girlfriend, who was living in a student home in eastern Germany end of the 90s. They didn’t have phones in the student home, but two public phone boxes that could be called in front of the building. For roughly 150 students. Fun times! We often scheduled for past midnight because that was a „low traffic“ time…

@neil The only rotary phone I remember using was at the YMCA . This was long after we had push button phones but those black rotary phones were indestructible

@neil Yes 😂

@neil I remember when we were camping in France with a boy scouts group and made reverse-charge calls home to Germany from a phone booth in Bretagne. We were half a dozen boys in a row and there was a single operator I think and at some point she asked how many more of us are still waiting in line 😁
#80sKid

@neil Oh boy, do I have an audio clip for you! https://othermindsrecords.bandcamp.com/track/border-dissolve-in-audiospace #LiamOGallagher (not to be confused with Liam Gallagher)

@neil In other news... I am _very_ old...

@neil "Used the collect call trick to tell someone it's time to pick you up, for free"

@neil

[×] Did literal cut and paste work to make camera ready telephone books ("yellow pages")
[×] Can "dial" rotary using the hook button when faced with a dial lock

@neil Ugh. 6 out of 8.

@neil None 😕

@neil You missed one - have you ever used a phone that had NO dial, where an operator connected all calls? Yes, I have.

@neil
I got ⅞ and I think I'll never have the opportunity to get that last ⅛. 💔

I was unsure about "Dialed from one exchange to another…", so I looked it up and I've definitely done it.

@neil I was born in 1975, so yeah.

@neil

Extra points: placed an international trunk call.

@neil Should have added Used a party line to the list. Each house had its own special ring so you knew if it was for you or not.

@neil my friend used to make collect calls to her mom (which her mom would decline) to let her know it was time to pick us up after school.

#BobWeottababyeetzaboy

https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs

@neil
I still have a rotary phone 😲

@neil Here (Belgium) you couldn't call pay phones AFAIK, they didn't have numbers printed on them and didn't show any caller ID. So it was always surprising to me as a kid to see people calling payphones in movies.

@neil I only did two of these things and that was at #39c3.

@neil The old (western) german railway telephone network had exchanges you could call into via a prefix. Once the prefix was dialled, you could hear an automatic announcement of the location, like "Hamburg! Hamburg! Hamburg!", before being able to dial on.

@neil Yes to everything except the thing with routing and multiple exchanges.

@neil Why, yes, I AM old, thank you.

@neil apologies if someone already said this, but I remember dialing "popcorn" to find out what time it was. (US thing)

@neil These results make no sense; seems that the only respondents are old gits who seldomly needed to get in touch with their electricity or gas providers.

@neil
I wonder if I used a phone card and I don't remember it. I never had a cellphone, so it seems likely.

@neil
i never wanted to use internet, it was imposed on me, so I will be disrepectufull, so the answer is fock off and die.

diehttps://youtu.be/cJLq2W7fvqU

@neil I'm ticking ⅞

@neil
Oh, shit. I'm old, aren't I?

@neil

What does "Dialed from one exchange to another to route a call" mean ?

Until a teenager, there was only 5 numbers to dial. To dial out of town we had to prepend a 2 digit area code. Out of State I have no idea what was needed. If that area-code is "another exchange", then I should have said yes on that one too.

@neil The real question is, have you ever, when you where ten, decided to do prank calls on random numbers in the phone book based on their names, and then crossed out the entries you'd pranked with your frie^Wno, that was me on my own.

And then got discovered by your parents because of your meticulous prank call records.

Note: this was in the late seventies.

@neil none of the above

@neil I'm 60. Like others here, I'm not entirely sure what "Dialled from one exchange to another to route a call" even means... but I've done all the others.

Thanks for making me feel twenty years older than I am. :-|

@neil

Been a (human) telephone operator

@neil 97% used a telephone book!? Are there no people under 30 here?

@neil Alright, I don't feel old :) (because I marked options with high percentage; or maybe that means I'm old) anyway, good pool 👍

@neil everyone is old here

@neil do I get a bonus point for (sort of) owning a whole phone switchboard?

@neil I 100%'d this challenge AMA.

@neil not 100% sure about the operator call but think I must have. 70s U.K. kid.

@neil All of the above.

Alt...

cartoon of old person who is just spinal cord with a head using a wheelchair.

@neil Occasionally I'd hear a pay phone ringing with no one nearby. I'd pick up the phone and say "Hello, Frank?" Usually I'd just hear a click.

@neil

You forgot getting calls for free by tapping out the number on the receiver rest of the old black public phones with buttons A and B.

@neil when I was a teenager living in Luxembourg, I got locked out of my house. I walked to the big shipping arcade to find the French-English dictionaries, and looked up "locksmith" in it. Then I walked home, and asked our neighbour to borrow their phone book, so I could call a locksmith on my Nokia 3210.

@neil
Yo.

That's a lot of questions to call me old.

@neil I don't think I ever had a need for reversed charges, but I used to do price required calls weekly to my girlfriend when working away and staying in a small town hotel.

@neil Heck, I've used a payphone like a month ago. They still exist here, though not as numerous as in the past. Is that unusual?

@neil All of the above, plus phreaking with a blue box and its ilk. Jeebus, I'm soooooo old!

@neil I did them all and I'm "only" 45, WTF!?

@neil I'm Hungarian, in our phone booths a special coin ("tantusz") was used, which made a metallic "CLONG" sound falling down, when the line got connected. We still have a saying "the 'tantusz' has fallen" (leesett a tantusz) if someone understood something. Stories From Ancient Times ^.^

@neil
Done all apart from using a card and routing a call.

@neil

It's not related to the phone but raise your hand if you ever used a toothpick to rig a cable box to get free extra channels? 🤚 My family did this for years, until the cable company charged us hundreds of dollars for stolen cable after they found the toothpick we broke off inside the box. We told Mom not to buy the cheap toothpicks but she didn't listen!

@neil Once used a phone book to hold open a door.
Does that count?

@neil I’ve also had to wait for someone to get off a party-line to make a call 🙃

@neil pressed button B in a phone box....

@neil

☐ Climbed a telephone pole to make a call

@neil On the last one i have a fond memory from my uni days:

There was a department that was always locked. The put a phone next to the door so you could call to be let in. It was a rotary phone. This was in the 2000s.

The number of students who had absolutely no idea at all what to do with that phone, trying to press the buttons and nothing happened was astonishingly high. 😂

@neil

I might have done one or two things I didn't vote for, but it's been so long I don't remember.

All of the above? I grew up w a party line too!

@neil No question about party lines? Or using a switchboard to route a call?

My great grandparents still had a rotary phone when I was a kid, I remember it fondly!

@neil @leonieke in 1982 Burt Reynolds had beef with his phone company. The company gave him a free card but apparently Burt still wasn't happy and published the secret code and everyone in the US was able to make free calls for a while.

I did too, so I guess I did use a card?

@neil I have no idea what 7 means

@neil My grandpa used to collect phone cards, until the mid 2000s even. Germany is strange. My (other) Grandma had a rotary dial; *my* first (landline) phone was buttons, but still pulse dial. but my parents had a stand alone dial tone generator, intended to be used with mailboxes. so weird.

@neil at one point, I was a telephone operator (summer job)

@neil

I choose all the options that were available in the Federal Republic of #Germany in the 80s

-No Operators, self dailing
-No reversed charges within Germany
-No possibility to receive calls in a phone box
- Trunk calls were also already self dialing and switched automatically
-

@neil Fuck, fedi really does skew older, huh. Rotary phone and phone book was because I was at my grandmother's place and she still used those. And while I'm not old, I don't think most would call me young.

@neil 🟩 used to hack phone cards with a 9 Volt battery and an Eprom

@neil Yes, I remember the days when my mom knew I was at the pool and got a collect call from "Stevisdun Kumnow" which she would then decline....

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk I've never seen a pay phone that could *receive* calls.

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk Why does it 403 when I want to vote? There's 19 hours left!

@neil you missed "had a party line". 😁

@neil Oh. I feel very old now.

@neil

Bonus points for

* Had a party line
* Rented rather than owned a telephone

@neil
For extra credit, used a handheld DTMF tone generator to retrieve voice mail on a dial phone

@neil Yes. All the things.

@neil wow. Now I feel old(er) 🤣

@neil i used a rotary phone i think once, maybe.. and my grandparents used a phonebook as a booster seat for me when i was very small. but i would have voted "none of these"/empty vote, if i could, lol

@neil and of you checked any of these boxes it's time to schedule your colonoscopy

@neil

Bingo!

Checked them all...

@neil was waiting for the "you could be entitled to compensation" or "time to get your prostate checked" punchline.

@neil None of the above

@neil Want to feel old?

@neil add to that "placed a call from a boat via a coast radio station" too.

@neil (almost) all? In rural Poland in the 90s. The whole village had only 99 phone numbers, you'd call the human operator to dial out of the village. On holidays we had reserved time slots, because only one connection to the "outside" was possible. Rotary phones were the usual thing. Phone booths came later with an electronic phone station and longer phone numbers. Many phone cards had cool designs and we were collecting those. Manipulating the remaining credits as well. Fun times!

@neil

I'm old

Hugz & xXx

@neil
Okay, the Fediverse _is_ officially old people social media. 🙈 Hi everyone.

@neil @nina_kali_nina You missed the option "dialled from a payphone for free by battering the hangup switch" but I'll let you off with that since it was rare that people knew the trick and they did fix it eventually 😉

@neil tl;dr: where you born before 1990?

@neil also trying to call my girlfriend from a music festival I'd hitch hiked out to, where the only pay phone ate your money without registering it, I tried to reverse charges via an automated system that gave you a few seconds to record your name. No one was home at her place but their answering machine message was the same length as the robot operator's blurb, so I smuggled my message through the reverse charge system.

@neil dammit I know I just turned 74, but did you have to rub it in?! 🤪

@neil Guilty as charged on all counts, but not admitting to additional crimes.

Re dialling from one exchange to another; do you mean the dodge for multiway group chats? Call person A, put them on hold, call person B on a distant exchange, put them on hold, etc. until you’ve got the whole family on the call? (all the charges come to the first phone, so pick that carefully)

@neil @pseudonymsupreme

@tayfonay the point is, they robbed a bank with a telephone

@neil what? No "have you ever used a tone generator to simulate quarters going into a payphone?"

@neil Have also served as a switchboard operator, with the hot patch cables and the physical switches...

@neil
What is the penultimate option? My app cut it off.

@neil
I still use a phone book

@neil @alice Been made to feel old by a poll? ✅

@neil Guilty on all accounts, still use the last phonebook distributed around here.

@neil I forgot to tick it but realised after the dialing 0 for information is an Operator

@neil I want rotary dials back.
With the little sound
krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrSshhhhhhhhh *poc*

Bingo!

@neil + the missing one: used a party line.

@neil Yes to all of them. It's not all that long ago I took a Pi out of a rotary dial phone (Google Assistant via a Pi with an AIY voice hat). You picked up the receiver or dialled any single digit number to activate it.
I don't know if I'll ever use the rotary dial phone or not but it was fun to make while it lasted.

@neil I’m 25 and I’ve absolutely used a pay phone and the telephone book

@neil

Used a Captain Crunch whistle to...oh never mind, wrong poll...

@neil this country (NL) was too small to need many of those options 😂

@neil Fediverse age verification 😭

@neil at work we use phone cards for time tracking

Alt...

Phone card that is heavily worn on a bedsheet

@neil yes, i'm really old

@neil 6/8 of these are possible in my house.

I have more phones and phone exchanges than any reasonable person…

but so far no phonecard equipment, and no metering (so reverse charge calls aren’t really possible)

Alt...

Photo of a cluttered workshop space, there are 3 electromechanical phone exchanges visible, shelves of phones and storage boxes. On the workbench is a 2280Hz trunk signalling system under construction

@neil @Tooden Need to select all options. Dates me too well.
Also were you on a Party Line?

@neil Did I win?

@neil Fedi is full of old people. ✨

@neil Oh good. 90%, then, can easily make use of this innovative keyboard.

https://youtu.be/BgdWyD0cBx4?si=iZB5dGWDB6POXaPw

@neil I worked at the directory enquiries of the Deutsche Telekom in the 90s (which apparently ran till 2024).

@neil thank you for making me feel old, I ticked all but the exchange routing one 😂 hope you have an awesome day! 🥰

@neil
Dialled the operator from a phone box and shouted “get off the line, there’s a train coming!”

@neil
I have used a rotary phone before. It was in a museum. And what are phone cards and reverse charges?

@neil none of the above

@neil So is it an "Are you officially old"-Test ? 😄

@neil everything ticked.

@neil I'm not sure that calling to a public phone was even possible in the Netherlands

@neil I'm missing the "Vierteltelefone" which seems to be an Austrian special. 4 households sharing 1 landline having there own phone.

@neil does "Will you accept a collect call from «MomItsTimComePickMeUp»? No? «click»" count as reversing charges on a call? 😆

@neil
the reverse charge service we used allowed a few seconds of audio to record your name. Relatives would get calls like "Do you want to accept a reverse charge call from «HeyImComingHome30MinsLaterBye» or «OutOfCreditPleaseCallMeBack»?". Those "names" were transmitted at no cost, the requests were never accepted, and people would just call back at normal rates if needed.

@neil quite a few of these are US things... We never had "phone cards" here in the same sense. What might be called that were prepaid cards for public phones.

@neil I wonder if the using a phone book needs clarifying as using it as a phone book, and not as say a door stop or monitor stand... :p

@neil Fedi seems kind of old compared to other forms of social media.

@neil

Have you ever dialled a number by tapping on the cradle switch?

@neil I will add:
- Dialed a four digit number to reach someone in the same town
- Given my number as COpley 7-3892

@neil
✔ clicked and clicked the disconnect lever on a pay phone to make a call without paying. 😂

@neil Used to be able to dial any number with good accuracy by clicking on the hook switch on phones that had locks on the rotary dial.

@neil in a larger area, the same thing might be said about area codes ...which still work in the usa in some circumstances

@neil Anyone else used to give "three rings" to let someone know you got home safe? It was a way of sending a message without paying for the call, which never connected because the receiving person was expecting your call and would not pick up until they heard the fourth ring.

@neil

Based upon the poll results, it is obvious that there are many experienced people here. Also old.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n0geurEskdo

@neil @stiefkind tell my you‘re old without telling me you‘re old.

@Kletskous
I think, the liveliest Latvian server is Toot.lv. Scroll through the public timeline, maybe someone catches your eye.