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[-] Willem@kutsuya.dev 21 points 1 year ago

You can still receive texts on a rotorary right, then it’s read aloud by some computer voice

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can you T9 on a rotary phone? (you kids still know what T9 is, right?)

[-] Willem@kutsuya.dev 3 points 1 year ago

As far as I know, no, rotary phones don’t use the nowadays default way of dial tones, so even numeric inputs in call menus don’t work

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think you actually could use tones instead of pulse on a rotary phone.

Well, technically you could, if you took everything out and replaced all the guts to send the right pulse based on the timing of the rotation, of course. Or if you put some kind of translator between it and the network.

Rotary phones were fun because what they did was basically hang up shortly for each digit. So it was easy to dial a number just from the hook, even when there was one of those silly little padlocks on the dial.

[-] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

You used to be able to get phone diallers, they had two purposes

  1. You could store your phone book on it, select a number, it'll send the right tones out the speaker (you hold it against the mouthpiece)
  2. You could keep using a dial phone after they were no longer supported (by playing the tones down the mouthpiece)
[-] irmoz@reddthat.com 2 points 1 year ago

I heard that somewhere I think, not sure how true it is

[-] Willem@kutsuya.dev 5 points 1 year ago

It used to work at least here in the Netherlands, when you send a sms to a landline, the phone company has a tts service that reads texts like: “incoming text from zero six one… (etc) with the following text: ok boomer” and repeating that twice.

Used to be a really mechanical voice, but I’ve not had a landline in at least ten years.

[-] Catoblepas 1 points 1 year ago

Deaf people also sort of used to send texts by rotary phone. Before cell phones were a thing deaf people who wanted to use the phone had to have a keyboard/display combo called a TTY that hooked up to the phone line. What they typed on the TTY went out to an operator that could hear, who passed on what was written to the hearing person that the deaf person was trying to call, and any replies from the hearing person were typed up and sent back to the deaf person's TTY.

I think government services might still use TTY for the people who still have them, but that's a job that has to have pretty much disappeared. I have to imagine some of them heard/said some wild shit, haha.

this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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