Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Parkinson
Incoming calls were done by a one letter morse code. A ring would sound on all phones on that line, but you only answer the ring if it was your letter.
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This was rural. In town (a tiny place, actually) they all had their own lines, so no morse code needed. If the phone rang it was always for you. Us country folk thought that was pretty high tech. But the town folk still had to ask Pixie Steptoe to make an outgoing call.
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Yes, I was lucky enough to live in town; we had 576 souls in our town, so they could do with perhaps 100 private lines, and we had one. All the kids who lived on farms had "party lines" because it was expensive to run miles and miles of wires out to each farm, so they would string them all together on a single line, and everyone would have to wait their turn to make a call.
I still remember our phone number, it was 174!
