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That's because when they were young a 'normal land line' was the state of the art tech. Why were they fine using state of the art tech then? I guess older peopl

That's because when they were young a 'normal land line' was the state of the art tech. Why were they fine using state of the art tech then? I guess older people at the time found it confusing and the people complaining to you probably thought they should get with the times. It's the same stuff just in a cycle.

azalemeth 4y ago
Landlines were state-of-the-art tech more than a century ago; depending on when you define its invention it came at some point between 1844 and 1877 [1] and it was widespread by the second world war. There was a huge portion of the last century in which "just" having a landline was a relatively constant, relatively well defined utility and (from the consumer's point of view) the technology was mature and did not change much between arguably 1950 and about 1990. The rotary dial pulse dialling system was patented in 1891; the telephone I grew up using (in the 1980s) used essentially the same technology and pulse dialling gradually replaced it over the course of several decades. Most of the innovation took place on the side of the exchange, and the average telephone user probably noticed little other than changes in billing and a slowly decreasing frequency of talking to an operator. Cellphones are completely different. My "daily driver" smartphone, bought in 2017 for ~1/4 of my monthly salary, is obsolete and I have rooted it in order to continue to install security updates. This has locked me out of my Danish bank account. My mum's 1980s PSTN phone still works, even when the mains electricity is out, no technology change required. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Landlines were state-of-the-art tech more than a century ago And they were state-of-the-art until the late 1990s, when mass consumer mobile phones became a thing. You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. Their generation developed this technology - it can't be beyond them to learn it? > My mum's 1980s PSTN phone still works Well it doesn't for much of society - that's the point.
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    > You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. > Their generated developed this technology - it can't be beyond them to learn it? My point is that, actually, no: nobody alive predates the popularisation of the telephone (the oldest person listed as being alive at the moment was born in 1904 – by which point there were ~3 m telephone subscribers in the US [1] https://www.technofunc.com/index.php/domain-knowledge/telecom-industry/item/history-of-telecommunications-industry https://www.technofunc.com/index.php/domain-knowledge/teleco...). I think the point about being resistant to learning new skills is one thing, extreme poverty and the historically incredibly rapid widespread adoption of the smartphone is another. A smartphone from ten years ago is as good as useless for banking nowadays. If you're an 80 year old pensioner on a fixed income, it may well both be a significant proportion of your income, have taken a long time to learn to use and not exactly be understanding of your (statistically quite likely to be present) visual or fine manual dexterity difficulties, and I can very much imagine that you feel locked out of society for no good reason.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > nobody alive predates the popularisation of the telephone I didn't claim that. I said it was the state-of-the-art until recently, and it was. But I know what you mean. (Except newer smart phones tend to have better support for accessibility as people realise it's more important.)
      - MandieD 4y ago
        Depends on what you mean by “accessibility”… my 85-year-old aunt-in-law finds her iPhone 7 running iOS 15 to be far less accessible than her old iPhone 4 that probably stopped being updatable around iOS 7. All she wants to do is make phone calls, read texts and take pictures and view them in the order they were taken, and run those apps being foisted upon us. This is all becoming increasingly more difficult, and her careful notes that get her through her previous corner cases increasingly less helpful. I am already dreading what fresh clever hell Apple is going to unleash upon her when she gets shoved off this one because enough “critical” apps won’t run on iOS 15 anymore. My dad, early 70s, is still holding out with a flip phone (fortunately still available in 4G). His hands are quite useless on a touchscreen after 50+ years of concrete-oriented construction work, and I would LOVE to see Siri attempt to parse Deep East Texan. Newer phones are better for accessibility if lower visual or aural capability or some types of movement capacity are your main limitations, but are worse for many others. Increasingly larger phones are an awful trend for my friend who has severe muscular dystrophy and limited strength and range of motion, and voice assistants are a cruel joke for her tiny little voice.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Cell phones are pretty old. “Sprint” was an acronym for “South Pacific Railway Internal Network Technologies.” Used by passengers on railways since the 1920s.
  - fortran77 4y ago
    This isn't true at all. The name "Sprint" wasn't chosen until the 70s and the initial business was alternative long-distance carrier, not a railway cell phone. See: https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2022/05/23/jerry-marge-go-large-based-michigan-couple-who-gamed-lottery/9826514002/ https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2022/05/23/je...
    - s0rce 4y ago
      They had the famous pin drop commercials!
    - barnbuilder 4y ago
      I guess this is the person who posted recently about their very sad hobby of intentionally spreading misinformation on here and Wikipedia.
      - barnbuilder 4y ago
        Mea culpa, searching for the actual original name “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications” pulls up a number of interesting stories about the origins of the company running telegraph lines along the rail tracks. Example: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-railroad-telephone-businesses https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra... However I do not see anything resembling cell phone service happening until the 1970s.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Blame the obsolescence of your cell phone on the Android ecosystem and Google’s poor stewardship of Android. Microsoft also licenses its operating system to third parties and you PCs can get updated by the end user without having to worry about the OEM. Microsoft Windows 7 which just went out of support in 2020 ran on my 2006 era Mac. As far as phones, Apple released a security patch for the 2013 iPhone 5s less than four months ago.
- midasuni 4y ago
  They might have been state of the art, but they weren’t ubiquitous https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-phone.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-phone... 1 in 20 households lacked a phone in 1990, 1 in 5 in 1960, and those number his regional variations.
- Rediscover 4y ago
  > even when the mains electricity is out My ex (and still one of my best friends!) was (is?) a first responder for the Pacific North-West (think oil-spills on mountains and other ecological problems). She was required to have a land-line. It was great that it would forward to a mobile, and lacking that, dump back to a battery-backed-up voice mail unit on-premises (possibly more). OT: Her position seemed unique to me -- working for <whatever> $company, she would get alerted/activated for things in the Canada AND the U.S. And they would do the thing of "Where are You? ....... There's a heliport at X - we'll have a 'copter there in 15 minutes" and then I get to send her away clutch when I got home.
coldtea 4y ago
>Why were they fine using state of the art tech then? Because they're not against "state of the art" or even the notion of "state of the art" things in general, they're against smartphones in particular. People are also able to finding smartphones (and the requirement to have one for many aspects of dealing with the government and corporations) bothersome and annoying without having to (a) hate new technology in general, (b) have it be due to them being old. Amazingly (I know right? Who would have thought!) this can be true even if some people back in the day disliked landlines. It's almost like each technology is not just some magic miracle everybody should adopt with no downsides and all fun and games, but something that people can be pro or against it on a preference basis (in fact, some tech can also have bjective negative consequences and side-effects). Case in point I always disliked smartphones, and they become a thing at the time I was a teenager. And I know kids who were born with them who hate them. So there's that.
tharkun__ 4y ago
FWIW my mom loves her smart phone. She would probably use this stuff. She does still have a land line too for actual phone use but uses the smart phone for other things. However I won't use a smart phone for money or install an app for random things like a gym membership or a restaurant's menu. Never mind banking or medical stuff. It's really hard to verify what an app actually does under the hood and too many reports of even banking apps not getting SSL right and such. I know too much about how bad software development is security wise to trust any of this implicitly. Thanks but no thanks.
mullingitover 4y ago
If it was around when you were aged 0-20 it's like water to a fish, a natural part of the environment that you accept without thinking. If it was invented when you were 20-40 it's new but you're willing to adopt it after some consideration. If it was invented after you're 40 it's against the natural order of things and must be destroyed.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Well then, I really hope someone comes out with some nice AR kit within the next five years.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Also, for older people, new technology was dangerous. New farm equipment, new machines, etc. So they were brought up with the mentality of 'if you don't understand EVERYTHING about this, don't touch it, on risk of life and limb'. It's not that they are dumb or obtuse, in their world you have to understand the risk first, then you can use it. It's like the Japanese and baseball. In the USA it's balls then strikes, in Japan, it's strikes then balls. Older people think about strikes, younger people just think about balls.
  - rhamzeh 4y ago
    I like this tidbit! I think it is apt and we are collectively ignoring how dangerous new technology and technological trends are or can be because we can use them without understanding anything about them (I'd argue even their creators understand little about them).
  - einr 4y ago
    if you don't understand EVERYTHING about this, don't touch it, on risk of life and limb This is actually pretty good advice for smartphones, too. Okay, it won't hack off your leg, but it may affect your life profoundly and adversely in ways that are not obvious at first.
pigeons 4y ago
In several ways such as reliability and call quality, land lines from several years ago are a far superior technology to current cellphones. Of course most landline calls today go through dubious VoIP links and poorly maintained copper infrastructure, which is why I qualify with "from several years ago."
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  Were it not for this, I would go back to the landline that I enjoyed until recently. It regularly strikes me as absurd that quality was so much better on an old landline. It's an odd trade-off for which I would never have voted. Even still, my main complaint is over the loss of minor things like pay-phones. I think I'll always bemoan the idea of a telephone number being associated with a person, rather than a location.
  - midasuni 4y ago
    Quality on a PLain Old Telephone System is better, but quality of a zoom/teams/WhatsApp/etc voice call is better than POTS in my experience
dfg4456ds7 4y ago
I'm between 20 and 40. I'm a full time software developer. I've written software and firmware in my spare time. I've soldered MCUs and debugged them with an oscilloscope. I know better than 99% of people how my phone works. The issue is not that I am unwilling to learn new things. The issue is that cash has been functional as a method of payment for at least 3 thousand years, and the reasons being given for preventing it from being legal tender objectively do not stand up to scrutiny. There is no cycle. You're just wrong. Oh, and I use cash for 100% of the transactions that support it, because I know what's good for me.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
It's not the same. Not even close. Those old Bell Telephone phones were military grade. That is they rare broke down. 100s of slam!!! hang ups and they didn't flinch. But drop your mobile device and not only are you f'ed, you have to invest in getting it fixed. And until then you're a social outcast. To say nothing of the "sorry, you MUST update or else." Same stuff? Hardly.
- krolden 4y ago
  Military grade is just a marketing term
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
payphones were a thing and they could receive phone calls, so even if you yourself couldn't afford a landline you could still give and take phone calls.
LtWorf 4y ago
So now the state of the art is to let google/apple know where I go, when I sleep and sell this data to everyone? Great progress.
ls15 4y ago
> It's the same stuff just in a cycle. Older generations have not been asked to replace their expensive tech every 3 years. My grandparents bought one phone and one TV set and kept them for the rest of their lifes. Something is wrong with today's tech and not with the elderly people who are not able to adapt as fast as zoomers.
wink 4y ago
Your comparison is bad and you should know it. If they'd be complaining about their mobile phone bill being higher than their landline bill, fine - but that's not the case. I'm pretty sure the last land line phone my parents bought was under 100 bucks and it would still be working just fine 10 years later (that is in addition to the fact that we kinda transitioned from analog to ISDN around 2000, and then back). Compare to a new mobile phone every 3 years if you want security updates.

azalemeth 4y ago

Landlines were state-of-the-art tech more than a century ago; depending on when you define its invention it came at some point between 1844 and 1877 [1] and it was widespread by the second world war. There was a huge portion of the last century in which "just" having a landline was a relatively constant, relatively well defined utility and (from the consumer's point of view) the technology was mature and did not change much between arguably 1950 and about 1990. The rotary dial pulse dialling system was patented in 1891; the telephone I grew up using (in the 1980s) used essentially the same technology and pulse dialling gradually replaced it over the course of several decades. Most of the innovation took place on the side of the exchange, and the average telephone user probably noticed little other than changes in billing and a slowly decreasing frequency of talking to an operator. Cellphones are completely different. My "daily driver" smartphone, bought in 2017 for ~1/4 of my monthly salary, is obsolete and I have rooted it in order to continue to install security updates. This has locked me out of my Danish bank account. My mum's 1980s PSTN phone still works, even when the mains electricity is out, no technology change required. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing

chrisseaton 4y ago
> Landlines were state-of-the-art tech more than a century ago And they were state-of-the-art until the late 1990s, when mass consumer mobile phones became a thing. You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. Their generation developed this technology - it can't be beyond them to learn it? > My mum's 1980s PSTN phone still works Well it doesn't for much of society - that's the point.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  > You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. > Their generated developed this technology - it can't be beyond them to learn it? My point is that, actually, no: nobody alive predates the popularisation of the telephone (the oldest person listed as being alive at the moment was born in 1904 – by which point there were ~3 m telephone subscribers in the US [1] https://www.technofunc.com/index.php/domain-knowledge/telecom-industry/item/history-of-telecommunications-industry https://www.technofunc.com/index.php/domain-knowledge/teleco...). I think the point about being resistant to learning new skills is one thing, extreme poverty and the historically incredibly rapid widespread adoption of the smartphone is another. A smartphone from ten years ago is as good as useless for banking nowadays. If you're an 80 year old pensioner on a fixed income, it may well both be a significant proportion of your income, have taken a long time to learn to use and not exactly be understanding of your (statistically quite likely to be present) visual or fine manual dexterity difficulties, and I can very much imagine that you feel locked out of society for no good reason.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > nobody alive predates the popularisation of the telephone I didn't claim that. I said it was the state-of-the-art until recently, and it was. But I know what you mean. (Except newer smart phones tend to have better support for accessibility as people realise it's more important.)
    - MandieD 4y ago
      Depends on what you mean by “accessibility”… my 85-year-old aunt-in-law finds her iPhone 7 running iOS 15 to be far less accessible than her old iPhone 4 that probably stopped being updatable around iOS 7. All she wants to do is make phone calls, read texts and take pictures and view them in the order they were taken, and run those apps being foisted upon us. This is all becoming increasingly more difficult, and her careful notes that get her through her previous corner cases increasingly less helpful. I am already dreading what fresh clever hell Apple is going to unleash upon her when she gets shoved off this one because enough “critical” apps won’t run on iOS 15 anymore. My dad, early 70s, is still holding out with a flip phone (fortunately still available in 4G). His hands are quite useless on a touchscreen after 50+ years of concrete-oriented construction work, and I would LOVE to see Siri attempt to parse Deep East Texan. Newer phones are better for accessibility if lower visual or aural capability or some types of movement capacity are your main limitations, but are worse for many others. Increasingly larger phones are an awful trend for my friend who has severe muscular dystrophy and limited strength and range of motion, and voice assistants are a cruel joke for her tiny little voice.
pyuser583 4y ago
Cell phones are pretty old. “Sprint” was an acronym for “South Pacific Railway Internal Network Technologies.” Used by passengers on railways since the 1920s.
- fortran77 4y ago
  This isn't true at all. The name "Sprint" wasn't chosen until the 70s and the initial business was alternative long-distance carrier, not a railway cell phone. See: https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2022/05/23/jerry-marge-go-large-based-michigan-couple-who-gamed-lottery/9826514002/ https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2022/05/23/je...
  - s0rce 4y ago
    They had the famous pin drop commercials!
  - barnbuilder 4y ago
    I guess this is the person who posted recently about their very sad hobby of intentionally spreading misinformation on here and Wikipedia.
    - barnbuilder 4y ago
      Mea culpa, searching for the actual original name “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications” pulls up a number of interesting stories about the origins of the company running telegraph lines along the rail tracks. Example: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-railroad-telephone-businesses https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162963607/sprint-born-from-ra... However I do not see anything resembling cell phone service happening until the 1970s.
scarface74 4y ago
Blame the obsolescence of your cell phone on the Android ecosystem and Google’s poor stewardship of Android. Microsoft also licenses its operating system to third parties and you PCs can get updated by the end user without having to worry about the OEM. Microsoft Windows 7 which just went out of support in 2020 ran on my 2006 era Mac. As far as phones, Apple released a security patch for the 2013 iPhone 5s less than four months ago.
midasuni 4y ago
They might have been state of the art, but they weren’t ubiquitous https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-phone.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-phone... 1 in 20 households lacked a phone in 1990, 1 in 5 in 1960, and those number his regional variations.
Rediscover 4y ago
> even when the mains electricity is out My ex (and still one of my best friends!) was (is?) a first responder for the Pacific North-West (think oil-spills on mountains and other ecological problems). She was required to have a land-line. It was great that it would forward to a mobile, and lacking that, dump back to a battery-backed-up voice mail unit on-premises (possibly more). OT: Her position seemed unique to me -- working for <whatever> $company, she would get alerted/activated for things in the Canada AND the U.S. And they would do the thing of "Where are You? ....... There's a heliport at X - we'll have a 'copter there in 15 minutes" and then I get to send her away clutch when I got home.

coldtea 4y ago

>Why were they fine using state of the art tech then? Because they're not against "state of the art" or even the notion of "state of the art" things in general, they're against smartphones in particular. People are also able to finding smartphones (and the requirement to have one for many aspects of dealing with the government and corporations) bothersome and annoying without having to (a) hate new technology in general, (b) have it be due to them being old. Amazingly (I know right? Who would have thought!) this can be true even if some people back in the day disliked landlines. It's almost like each technology is not just some magic miracle everybody should adopt with no downsides and all fun and games, but something that people can be pro or against it on a preference basis (in fact, some tech can also have bjective negative consequences and side-effects). Case in point I always disliked smartphones, and they become a thing at the time I was a teenager. And I know kids who were born with them who hate them. So there's that.

tharkun__ 4y ago

FWIW my mom loves her smart phone. She would probably use this stuff. She does still have a land line too for actual phone use but uses the smart phone for other things. However I won't use a smart phone for money or install an app for random things like a gym membership or a restaurant's menu. Never mind banking or medical stuff. It's really hard to verify what an app actually does under the hood and too many reports of even banking apps not getting SSL right and such. I know too much about how bad software development is security wise to trust any of this implicitly. Thanks but no thanks.

mullingitover 4y ago

If it was around when you were aged 0-20 it's like water to a fish, a natural part of the environment that you accept without thinking. If it was invented when you were 20-40 it's new but you're willing to adopt it after some consideration. If it was invented after you're 40 it's against the natural order of things and must be destroyed.

thfuran 4y ago
Well then, I really hope someone comes out with some nice AR kit within the next five years.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Also, for older people, new technology was dangerous. New farm equipment, new machines, etc. So they were brought up with the mentality of 'if you don't understand EVERYTHING about this, don't touch it, on risk of life and limb'. It's not that they are dumb or obtuse, in their world you have to understand the risk first, then you can use it. It's like the Japanese and baseball. In the USA it's balls then strikes, in Japan, it's strikes then balls. Older people think about strikes, younger people just think about balls.
- rhamzeh 4y ago
  I like this tidbit! I think it is apt and we are collectively ignoring how dangerous new technology and technological trends are or can be because we can use them without understanding anything about them (I'd argue even their creators understand little about them).
- einr 4y ago
  if you don't understand EVERYTHING about this, don't touch it, on risk of life and limb This is actually pretty good advice for smartphones, too. Okay, it won't hack off your leg, but it may affect your life profoundly and adversely in ways that are not obvious at first.

pigeons 4y ago

In several ways such as reliability and call quality, land lines from several years ago are a far superior technology to current cellphones. Of course most landline calls today go through dubious VoIP links and poorly maintained copper infrastructure, which is why I qualify with "from several years ago."

Eupraxias 4y ago
Were it not for this, I would go back to the landline that I enjoyed until recently. It regularly strikes me as absurd that quality was so much better on an old landline. It's an odd trade-off for which I would never have voted. Even still, my main complaint is over the loss of minor things like pay-phones. I think I'll always bemoan the idea of a telephone number being associated with a person, rather than a location.
- midasuni 4y ago
  Quality on a PLain Old Telephone System is better, but quality of a zoom/teams/WhatsApp/etc voice call is better than POTS in my experience

dfg4456ds7 4y ago

I'm between 20 and 40. I'm a full time software developer. I've written software and firmware in my spare time. I've soldered MCUs and debugged them with an oscilloscope. I know better than 99% of people how my phone works. The issue is not that I am unwilling to learn new things. The issue is that cash has been functional as a method of payment for at least 3 thousand years, and the reasons being given for preventing it from being legal tender objectively do not stand up to scrutiny. There is no cycle. You're just wrong. Oh, and I use cash for 100% of the transactions that support it, because I know what's good for me.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

It's not the same. Not even close. Those old Bell Telephone phones were military grade. That is they rare broke down. 100s of slam!!! hang ups and they didn't flinch. But drop your mobile device and not only are you f'ed, you have to invest in getting it fixed. And until then you're a social outcast. To say nothing of the "sorry, you MUST update or else." Same stuff? Hardly.

krolden 4y ago
Military grade is just a marketing term

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

payphones were a thing and they could receive phone calls, so even if you yourself couldn't afford a landline you could still give and take phone calls.

LtWorf 4y ago

So now the state of the art is to let google/apple know where I go, when I sleep and sell this data to everyone? Great progress.

ls15 4y ago

> It's the same stuff just in a cycle. Older generations have not been asked to replace their expensive tech every 3 years. My grandparents bought one phone and one TV set and kept them for the rest of their lifes. Something is wrong with today's tech and not with the elderly people who are not able to adapt as fast as zoomers.

wink 4y ago

Your comparison is bad and you should know it. If they'd be complaining about their mobile phone bill being higher than their landline bill, fine - but that's not the case. I'm pretty sure the last land line phone my parents bought was under 100 bucks and it would still be working just fine 10 years later (that is in addition to the fact that we kinda transitioned from analog to ISDN around 2000, and then back). Compare to a new mobile phone every 3 years if you want security updates.