Tony wrote:
(snip)code tho). That was a rotary phone that
was in the house when I bought it 27 years ago. It is hooked up in the
garage.
In true "illegal phone" tradition, only one of them rings ;-)

I don't understand the last sentence?

In the old days, with the relatively high-draw mechanical ringers, they
could put a meter across your line and see how much juice it drew when
the ring tone was sent. Look on the bottom of a modern throw-away phone
for the Ringer Equivalence Number (REN)- it is usually about 0.65 or
so, as compared to 1.0 for a real phone. And if Ma Bell was suspicious,
she could figure out how many you had. Standard home POTS line, if you
put too many phones on, none would ring. So people with bootleg phones
would disconnect the ringers on the 'extra' ones.

There was a day when repeatedly getting caught with bootleg phones would
get your service terminated. And since you could only get phones from
the phone company, you were presumed to be holding stolen property. (For
Ma Bell, at least, it said it was theirs right on it.) For a few years
after the judge said the phone company had to allow customer-owned
equipment, they were still allowed to require one phone-company owned
phone per line. So a lot of small businesses who were early adopters for
having their own phone system, would have a board on the basement wall
with a 'real' wall phone for each line, never used.

--
aem sends...