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Wasn't that often the deal with THE Phone Company (yay, monopolies!)? Every month lots of fees and god, they just got to print money with long distance calls. And by they, I mean AT&T. The old school AT&T with the landlines. My parents having been Great Depression kids went cheap and got a model from the 40s when we moved into what became the family homestead in '61. They never changed it until the phone company insisted.

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With some odd exceptions, all phones were rentals up until about the time of the AT&T break-up. That's why they were so well-built back then. A 500-type phone like above cost about $20 to manufacture but they charged you $1.20 per month rental. The phone's average life was about 15 years...so a GREAT revenue stream. They justified rental-only as a means to "protect the network". The logic was that foreign equipment could damage the network. It was also one of the reasons for the break-up: to stimulate innovation. The choice of phones back then was VERY limited....just look at that ugly red and black two-tone phone. You would have been charged an extra $5 a month for that monstrosity. And the "cut-off switch" was 75¢ per month!

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lady-ganesh.livejournal.com

Our family had two of the old ones, which had been, er, liberated by a member of the family who once worked for Bell. The one I have still worked the last time I plugged it in.

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mellzie-1963.livejournal.com

Our extension phone in the basement was an illegal bootleg, an old black wall phone my dad salvaged from a burnt out house. You couldn't dial out, but it beat running up the stairs from the laundry or rec room, every time the phone rang. Before that, we didn't have extensions, because my parents begrudged the phone company every penny.

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benbenberi.livejournal.com

Home phones were always rented from The Phone Company (i.e. AT&T) until the 1980s. (But when I set up my first apartment in 1982 I bought a phone for it, at a phone store.) At least through the 1970s it was standard for phones to be hard-wired in place - modular jacks were also a novelty ca. 1980. My parents' house, built in the mid 60s, had 3 wall phones installed, and the same phones were still there, still working perfectly, still rented from the phone company, nearly 30 years later.

Edited Date: 2012-09-19 03:23 am (UTC)

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pikkewyntjie.livejournal.com

One of my first jobs was as a telemarketer (yes, I am ashamed) for a phone company that provided service to small towns. The company was also trying to get out of the phone renting business. In addition to selling all the new services that they were offering (call waiting, call forwarding, etc.), my job was to convince people to stop renting their phones and buy the phone they already had outright or turn their rented phones in and buy a phone somewhere else. It was extremely hard to convince older people to do this because they didn't want to be responsible for repairing or replacing the phone. Why did we have to go and mess up a good system? I agreed with them. I hated that job and didn't stay with it very long.

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moem

Sure. We had the most standard model there is. This is what a whole generation thinks of when they hear the word telefoon:

That's a whole generation of Dutch people, of course.

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I think that's pretty easy on the eyes for 'standard' equipment, but then I always admired European phones when they turned up in movies. Is that a "hold" button on it?

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It had many uses. Most commonly it was wired to be able to buzz another phone on the same line. It did not work as a hold button.

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In the early 1980s I worked in The Phone Center Store for Pacific Telephone in San Francisco. They had storefronts in several neighborhoods where users came to set up service, pay bills, exchange defective phones, etc. They also had a line of about ten phones that you could purchase. There were some basic trimlines, the Mickey Mouse phone, a kitchen wall phone with an attached message board, and a few other novelty styles. They cost upward of $100, which would be something like $400 today. A pretty big investment. They were really well built, though they weighed a ton. A lot of them still included metal bells.

The marketing plan was for users to check in with a receptionist (me) and then browse around the store a bit before chatting informally with a sales consultant who would set up your service and try to get you to upgrade. They were just laying the cables for touchtone service in residential areas, and that was a big sell. I remember the pitch 30 years ago telling people that someday they'd be able to use their touchtone phone like their own computer terminal -- it seemed so futuristic! And it cost an extra dollar per month.

That was also the time period where you could subscribe to cheaper long distance services. You'd call an 800 number and then put in your personal PIN, then dial the call. It was a LOT cheaper.

The neighborhood shop did not last too long. Once the bit breakup hit, they went back to just having an office downtown.

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I remember the Pac Bell stores....there was one on Alum Rock Avenue in San Jose that I went to. Yes, touchtone service actually REDUCED telco's costs but hey charged $1 a month. Same with Call Waiting...they make more money because you actually answer the second call (rather than caller just getting a busy signal) but they still charged for the feature. A double hit. Same with voicemail, because the call completes they get the call revenue. But they still charged for voicemail. Yes, the Long Distance service was from Southern Pacific (Railroad!) and was the forerunner of Sprint (the SP of Sprint comes from Southern Pacific). It was vastly cheaper than AT&T long distance but it was sometimes hard to hear.

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Oh man, I was thinking that it was Sprint we used for long distance, but I didn't say it because I wasn't certain. But I never knew that the SP was for Southern Pacific. That's fascinating. When I was a college student in Berkeley, I had a WATS line to call home to Napa for a while.

The touchtone calls may have been cheaper to put through, but they required a totally new infrastructure. What you were really paying for was to replace all the cabling to support the electronic features. And of course, any new feature should cost more, right? It costs virtually nothing to send text messages piggy-backed on other data transmissions, yet many people still pay 10¢ each for them.

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Hi! Actually implementing touchtone service was extremely cheap for the telephone companies. All it required was a touchtone decoder, a very small little circuit board that was added to the senders of panel, #1 and #5 crossbar offices use in San Franciso in the 1970s. The newer ESS central offices inherently had the capability. There wasn't any need for new cabling or infrastructure or anything like that. If they told you that they were pulling the wool over your eyes!

I also had access to WATS while at college in Buffalo!! ....no one knew it, but if you dialled "8" and then a city code you could call almost anywhere in New York state. They discovered it though and removed access from the dorms.

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As I understand it, the problem was, as usual, with the last 100 feet, e.g., from the street to the house. That's always the snag. Anyway, I sure wasn't paying for it in those days.

And weren't you hardy, moving from San Jose to Buffalo? Or just too young to know better?

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hahaha..it was the other way around! I grew up in Buffalo and moved to San Jose. I distinctly remember the February day I flew to San Jose for my job interview. As the plane took off from Buffalo it broke through a thich layer of gray skies into the sun. I hadn't seen the sun in months!! And when we landed in San Jose it was 70 degrees...50 degrees warmer than Buffalo on the same day. I didn't care how the job interview went..I was going to stay! And San Jose in those days was full of fruit trees and orchards...beautiful.

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My father was born on one of those orchards. My grandmother used to tell us that when she was a little girl she used to see Mrs. Winchester go by in her carriage. I wish the California economy weren't so trashed. I've been in New York City for the past twenty years and ready to get back to the Bay Area. It sounds ironic to say I can't afford to leave Manhattan, but in this case it's true.

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Here's a webpage with every imaginable type of WE telephone! http://www.paul-f.com/index.html

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booksandcheeses.livejournal.com

I sort of like the red and black phone!

It surprises me that answering machines stayed large for quite some time.

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lady-ganesh.livejournal.com

I totally want the red and black one. :D

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franklanguage.livejournal.com

So do I. Actually, I want a Trimline™; my last one has given up the ghost and I need one for a small space.

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I always thought the Trimlines looked smart but were uncomfortable to hold over time and damn near impossible to hold with your shoulder.

So nobody has love for the Princess line?

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moem

Hell yes. I'd happily take it in any of those colours (except brown) combined with black.

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fickletastictot.livejournal.com

IA I think it's hot

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stormgren.livejournal.com

I have a small collection of WECo sets going back to the 30s. It's growing all the time. Still have a Bell 554 on the wall at home, because it's the only ringer that you can actually hear from the backyard.

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I always loved the 6 button 565 with the big 25 pair cord and connector...you could make the buttons light up!

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whoseline_wlsc

I like those phones! I'd want one in yellow.

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In the 1970s they introduced Lime Green and Orange. Ugggh.

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mellzie-1963.livejournal.com

Yep--we finally replaced our verrrry basic putty-colored 500-type desk model with a vivid, burnt-orange trimline (they were convertible, but my folks hung it on the kitchen wall) in the late seventies--about the same time our small town went from 4-digit numbers to requiring the entire seven, for even local calls.

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Oh yeah, that horrible beige color! Terrible but popular in office settings for some reason.

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