When I was about eight I found an old rotary dial phone that I decided to take apart. Can't remember if I had permission. But seeing how unbelievably simple th

When I was about eight I found an old rotary dial phone that I decided to take apart. Can't remember if I had permission. But seeing how unbelievably simple the underlying functionality was absolutely blew me away and opened my eyes to how much you can do by building on top of very simple things. For those who don't know, early local phone connections did NOT work on tones. Instead, the rotary dial simply broke the connection in quick succession whatever number times for the number you'd dialed to. And the rotary dial did this by simply breaking it once for every number that went by on the way back to its rest position. Just notches in a disk. Simple as that. This gave me a little revelation, and I found you could actually make calls without use of the dial at all. You simply clicked the hangup button very quickly in succession for the number you wanted, then paused, then repeated. I made it a sport to try to reach my friends that way. Which was risky, because a couple wrong clicks and I might be opening an expensive long distance call to anywhere. Formative stuff. So big thanks to the poster for the walk back down memory lane. I love the project.