5 ms·

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

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 My "daily driver" smartphone, bought in 2017 for ~1/4 of my monthly salary, is obsolete and I have rooted it in order to continue to install security updates.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.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        My dad is 80 and uses an Android all of the time - mostly by voice.
        overboard2 4y ago
        Does he have a deep east texan accent?
- JamesianP 4y ago
  They had T1 and ISDN at least since the 70s. The landline is special because laws require a line-powered phone system that can survive outages. It's a minimal and reliable layer of infrastructure which still makes perfect sense for people with limited communications needs.
  - eru 4y ago
    Laws can be changed. And laws should reflect the realities of society, not the other way round.
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  > or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. Is newer better? Should people be required to buy an array of fragile and expensive devices just to function? How many things should they be required to maintain and how complex should they be?
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    If newer is what there is, you can either get on and learn it, or spend your time complaining!
    - HarryHirsch 4y ago
      Personally, I find that people complaining about cellphones needing charge, cellphones needing replacement and poor cellphone reception have a point. You didn't have that with landlines. Back in the day, one would carry coins and use a phone box when needed. Nowadays everyone gets to carry a cellphone and pay 40 dollars minimum every month for the privilege. Cellphones are a regression, and we haven't even talked about the privacy aspect.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      There's legitimate concerns around having to use your phone for everything, given how easy it makes for corporations and governments to track you, and how you're locked into a continuous upgrade cycle, and inundated with notifications and apps vying for your attention.
    - kuramitropolis 4y ago
      No. You can also dissent. You can also resist. And if newer is worse (for you), it's your obligation to do so.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        > You can also dissent. You can also resist. Covered by ‘complaining’.
- mellavora 4y ago
  > You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. When the UI changes randomly at regular frequencies, what can you learn? There is no knowledge to accumulate. Hell, even the thing where stuff sorts by "most recent access" makes learning impossible. How do you find older things? (the "search" function is contrary to how the brain works, brains are wired to find things by location which doesn't work if there isn't a location because stuff is always moved by the damn magic elves).
  - gnu8 4y ago
    > When the UI changes randomly at regular frequencies, what can you learn? There is no knowledge to accumulate. Tech companies have the same level of respect for their users as slaughterhouses do for cattle. We are living in The Jungle, except it’s techbro computer shit instead of meatpacking.
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.

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.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      My dad is 80 and uses an Android all of the time - mostly by voice.
      - overboard2 4y ago
        Does he have a deep east texan accent?
JamesianP 4y ago
They had T1 and ISDN at least since the 70s. The landline is special because laws require a line-powered phone system that can survive outages. It's a minimal and reliable layer of infrastructure which still makes perfect sense for people with limited communications needs.
- eru 4y ago
  Laws can be changed. And laws should reflect the realities of society, not the other way round.
sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
> or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. Is newer better? Should people be required to buy an array of fragile and expensive devices just to function? How many things should they be required to maintain and how complex should they be?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  If newer is what there is, you can either get on and learn it, or spend your time complaining!
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    Personally, I find that people complaining about cellphones needing charge, cellphones needing replacement and poor cellphone reception have a point. You didn't have that with landlines. Back in the day, one would carry coins and use a phone box when needed. Nowadays everyone gets to carry a cellphone and pay 40 dollars minimum every month for the privilege. Cellphones are a regression, and we haven't even talked about the privacy aspect.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    There's legitimate concerns around having to use your phone for everything, given how easy it makes for corporations and governments to track you, and how you're locked into a continuous upgrade cycle, and inundated with notifications and apps vying for your attention.
  - kuramitropolis 4y ago
    No. You can also dissent. You can also resist. And if newer is worse (for you), it's your obligation to do so.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > You can also dissent. You can also resist. Covered by ‘complaining’.
mellavora 4y ago
> You can either be stubborn about tech, or adopt a grown-mindset and learn about new things. When the UI changes randomly at regular frequencies, what can you learn? There is no knowledge to accumulate. Hell, even the thing where stuff sorts by "most recent access" makes learning impossible. How do you find older things? (the "search" function is contrary to how the brain works, brains are wired to find things by location which doesn't work if there isn't a location because stuff is always moved by the damn magic elves).
- gnu8 4y ago
  > When the UI changes randomly at regular frequencies, what can you learn? There is no knowledge to accumulate. Tech companies have the same level of respect for their users as slaughterhouses do for cattle. We are living in The Jungle, except it’s techbro computer shit instead of meatpacking.

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.