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Kids Love Landline Phones
- wibbily 2y agoI've noticed this with my young cousins. Has to be the tangibility. Like sure Daddy's cell phone is easier to use - I can tap Mommy's face and start a video call - but the landline is Big and Noisy and has Moving Parts just like my toys. And I don't have to ask permission to use it. I can see the appeal. Fwiw they feel the same way about digital cameras and ipods - touchscreens are "simple" but nothing beats a single-purpose tool for playing around with.
- tombert 2y agoFriend of mine bought an old rotary phone recently, and he spent some time playing with Asterisk to make it so that you could dial different numbers and get things to play. For example, he had it so you could dial "666" and it would play "Antichrist Superstar", and "Jenny" if you dialed "8675309". I think his goal was to build a toy for his kids in the process. Or maybe just a toy for himself.
- jmedefind 2y agoI just did the same thing for my kids, they love rotary dialing. Plus Grandpa can call them anytime.
- tombert 2y agoI never had a rotary phone, by the time I was born (1990) touch-tone was pretty much the standard everywhere, and my parents were/are kind of "gadget people" and as such tried to keep their tech super current (we had internet in our house before any of my friends did, for example). I've never actually used a rotary phone that was actually in service. I think I know how to dial with it, and I've played with one briefly at a GoodWill about 17 years ago. They definitely have a very satisfying "chunkiness" to them, as most clockwork gadgets tend to. I wouldn't mind picking one up but I have to fight against my hoarding tendencies, and I don't have any kids to which I can justify making them a toy.
- grahamj 2y agoI’m old enough that, growing up, rotaries would have worked on our phone line but not old enough to have actually had a rotary phone. It did used to cost more for touch tone service though (incredibly) and my dad was cheap so our digital phones were all set to pulse dial mode. All the “high tech” of a digital phone with the “fun” of having to wait for the digits to pulse out! Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch so I got pretty good at dialing by tapping the switch myself.
- tombert 2y ago> Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch I saw a Cathode Ray Dude video that talked about this recently. I definitely would have enjoyed playing with this and annoying my parents if I had known that that was how it worked.
- jdwithit 2y agoI've had a contact in my phone named "The Beast" with phone number 666 for more than 20 years now. Originally came about as a joke for some high school buddies when we were EXTREMELY into Iron Maiden. Now just a dumb easter egg for myself, or I guess anyone as weird as I am who gets hold of my phone and tries calling 666.
- germinalphrase 2y agoA long while back, I started building out a Cold War/MAD/Dr Strangelove audio game that would have used a multi-line red telephone (basically, a high stress choose your own adventure). Never got past the initial game dev side to start working on the soft/hardware implementation side, but might have to dink around with Asterick…
- tombert 2y agoMy friend told me that it wasn't difficult at all, I think he got the basic setup for it in few hours, and I think once he got it set up, it wasn't difficult to simply add more phone numbers and map them to MP3's or WAV files.
- grahamj 2y agoI’ve been on the lookout for an old analog phone for something similar but a bit different: Home Assistant can tap into a VOIP box and provide voice AI to it so I want to have a phone that you can just pick up and have a conversation with an AI. Maybe use varying system prompts to have it emulate historical figures or celebs or something. Will be fun for my tween I think :)
- drewcoo 2y agoI think I understand your friend. I have a century+ old house and want a candlestick phone in my foyer for the effect. Asterisk is super fun. I've been looking into what it would take to candlestick (NLP->) <-> Asterisk <-> some cell phone as my "home" number. The hard part for me is that the candlestick needs to "talk to an operator." [Edit: no dialing]
- TransAtlToonz 2y agoI miss how clear the sound was. Cellphones sound like absolute crap in comparison. I don't understand why.
- iambateman 2y agoOne time I heard someone say that people used to fall in love over the phone, but they don’t anymore. I think it’s basically true.
- hinkley 2y agoIs that the cellphone itself or the environment where the phone is used?
- TransAtlToonz 2y agoNeither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio. It's like they haven't upgraded voice quality in 30 years despite this being an obvious market advantage. Hell, you can still rig a physical handset to work with bluetooth + cellphone and it'll guaranteed sound terrible. EDIT: phrasing, wording.
- seba_dos1 2y ago> Neither? As someone who had to make sure that call audio was properly processed on a phone I worked on to make it match today's standards, I can say without hesitation: it's all three. The codec you get can vary from okay to terrible; the way mobile phones are built these days requires you to do echo cancellation; and the environment phones are used in requires you to do noise reduction. Just disable audio processing on your phone, feed the network with raw microphone input and notice the complaints from your interlocutors. I've been there :)
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Neither? It's however the voice is encoded over the cell network. Again, I don't understand why because there's more than enough signal to stream digital audio. Something's gone badly wrong in your memory; landline phones intentionally drop important vocal frequencies and automatically prevent everyone from sounding like themselves. Cell phones don't do that and have always had much, much, much better audio than landlines.
- joshstrange 2y agoI hate these articles so much. "Kids love paper maps", "Kids are trading in their smartphones for dumb phones", etc. No. No they are not. Period. It's a vanishingly tiny group of "kids" and in this case it's because they aren't allowed a smartphone... Ok, sure, any port in a storm but it's not like it was a choice. I'm not interested in debating when kids should get a smartphone but replace "landline phones" with "discord servers" and it's the same thing. Kids don't care about landline phones (sure it might be interesting initially), they care about talking with their friends. If they only method to do that was via cans and string they would be using that, not because they want to or it's better/best but because it's all they have available to them.
- aftbit 2y agoI like that landlines call a house, not a person. If I call my parents' landline, I never know which of them I'm going to talk to, and sometimes I just want to talk to "my parents" and not specifically pick which one. I also like that landlines can't be used to hijack your brainstem to the same degree that smartphones can. My friend's five year old gets to call her grandpa and grandma whenever she wants but can't get pulled into some YouTube Kids nonsense just because the screen was handy.
- drewcoo 2y ago[flagged]
- bdavbdav 2y agoIt feels like you’ve missed the sentiment here… not everything need be practical.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago> I like that landlines call a house, not a person. On that subject: My 75 y/o mother-in-law frequently starts calls to my wife's wireless phone saying "Oh, good-- you're home..." Rarely are we actually home when she calls. It's interesting to see her long-held assumptions about phones demonstrated.
- tippytippytango 2y agoI love that the kids are rediscovering things like landlines and baggy pants.
- namshe 2y agoJust wait until they find out about Tamagotchi!
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoApologies for the TVtropes link, but they're already well into the Tamagotchi: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Toys/Punirunes https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Toys/Punirunes
- BrenBarn 2y agoAlso wallet chains and Smashing Pumpkins T-shirts.
- floren 2y agoFor a while I had one of the chunky old black AT&T desk phones set up in the living room, wired to our ISP-provided VoIP box. One afternoon my 7 year old niece was visiting and we realized she'd never actually interacted with a land-line, so we spent the next hour playing with it. It took her a little bit to figure out the physical actions of lifting the handset and dialing the number, but then she had an absolute blast calling her parents, her grandma, my wife, and me. I snuck upstairs and called her, which surprised her. When I was a kid, I liked to play with the old rotary phone in the shop, and I always wanted to goof around with mom's old typewriter. There's something about these very tactile old devices that appeals to kids (and adults)
- ghaff 2y agoTactile/novelty/etc. That said, we have probably (collectively) given up reliability and quality to various degrees for in-our-pocket (mostly) always-there ubiquity.
- dilap 2y agoI remember being a little kid playing with the landline, just punching the numbers randomly, and eventually the operator came on and told me to stop playing with the phone!
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoI remember being 16 and getting a call one Saturday morning from two teenage girls who "just dialed random numbers until a boy answered." Talked to them for three hours :-)
- chaoticmass 2y agoWhen growing up watching Americas Funniest Home Videos my brother and I would run to the kitchen phone to press 1, 2, or 3 to ‘vote’ for our favorite finalist.
- GeekyBear 2y agoThe thing that the kids in my extended family have found fascinating is that their great-grandmother still has a rotary phone in a spare bedroom of her house. Every Thanksgiving holiday they insist on calling people from it.
- Animats 2y agoAnd they actually work! Voice quality is good. There's no echo. There's sidetone, to prevent people from talking too loud. Yesterday, I was trying to talk to someone whose iPhone is dying. Three disconnects. Hearing myself echoed back after about a second. Too much background noise. Gave up and sent email. (I miss the days of ISDN voice. 56Kb/s end to end. Full duplex. Rigidly synchronized at the bit level; no packet jitter. That's the best phone calls ever got.)
- uticus 2y ago> Rigidly synchronized at the bit level...the best phone calls ever got. We must own the same lawn and have the same troubles with the neighborhood kids. It's almost like making a circuit out of a few 7400-series ICs, versus writing a 2GB electron app to increment integers on a 16-core machine... but guess which is easier and more widely used.
- idiotsecant 2y agoThis is a reoccurring pattern. The flexibility of general purpose systems beats out even the highest efficiency single purpose systems.
- wink 2y agoOn the other hand I'd have to buy a special headset (this tiny jack) for my handset and overall it's much harder to block callers. But mostly I can't talk hands-free without buying something new. Also 90% of the time the callers on the landline want my wife and not me, but I'm the one working from home. "Calling the apartment" doesn't make sense for everyone. I don't really see _any_ benefit since they switched this over to mandatory transparent VoIP. A dedicated ISDN line as a backup was good, I agree.
- adregan 2y agoI have a toddler and I've been thinking about landlines for a while now. How do I teach him how to answer a call? I remember listening to my parents saying "this is she/he" when they answered a call and being amazed at that sentence. But more than that, when he's a little older, how would he call anyone to get help? When a phone is locked, you can call 911, but it's not really obvious how. A landline would be a nice big target. That said, our house, despite being a century old, doesn't have a single phone jack. I've been thinking about running an ethernet line for a VoIP phone, but they are pretty "buisness-y" and not the nicest to look at. Does anyone have a recommendation for a simple to use/nice to look at VoIP phone? EDIT: Looks like there are adapters that take ethernet in (and I could split the PoE for power too) and go out to a phone cord. I would probably want to terminate it to a wall plate, but then I could just buy any old phone I liked.
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoCan recommend having an oldschool landline phone. When my oldest was 6 and started walking home from school by herself, we got a cheap push-button landline phone and an cheap no-name box where you would plug power and a SIM card into one end and the phone cord into the other end. Taped a piece of paper with our phone numbers to the phone mount, and she would call us almost every day when she got home just because she could. And she still remembers our phone numbers by heart, 7 years later.
- lhamil64 2y agoYou can get devices that adapt an analog phone to VoIP, something like this https://a.co/d/54J6Svg https://a.co/d/54J6Svg I've never used that device so I can't say how good it is, but something like that would let you use any analog phone.
- patch_cable 2y agoI recently just set this up for my 5 year old. I bought a Grandstream HandyTone 801 as a bridge. I use voip.ms as a service provider. Both are geared toward more technical users, but the service is very reasonable for the price. Instructions for configuring it are clunky but not too bad: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Grandstream_HandyTone_802_-_HT802 https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Grandstream_HandyTone_802_-_HT8.... I had previously tried Ooma, but I didn't like that it wanted to sit between my router and modem.
- uticus 2y agoFor extra fun, find some old phones and use as intercoms.
- jongjong 2y agoIt was fun not knowing who was calling. Also, when you were calling, you didn't know who would be answering. Like you might want to talk to your friend but their mother or father answered. It would create unexpected interactions.
- hnpolicestate 2y agoMy intermediate grade students like those little Polaroid cameras than immediately print the photo.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoMy kids have never seen a landline and probably have no idea what it is
- PlunderBunny 2y agoMy parents still have a 'landline' phone, but it's not actually physically connected to a 'land line'. It has a 5G modem in it, but it's billed like a landline phone (no local call charges etc).
- artlessmax 2y agoWe’re building a startup exactly around this![1] The coolest thing IMO watching kids use an old-school home phone is how quickly they pick up new social skills/etiquette, especially compared to something more distraction-prone like Facetime. Also: the first time they try to plan their own playdate is infallibly hilarious. [1] https://tincan.kids/ https://tincan.kids/