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/dat

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.