aemeijers wrote:
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.

OK, yes I remember those days. As late as 1985 I remember hooking up
another "real" phone and it rang but the other phone just barely had the
power to "tick" the bells. Buying a cheap new phone took care of that
since their REN was so low. I also remember that I was supposed to pay
an extra $1/month for all additional phones. Screw that. I'm not sure,
but I think around that time they may have stopped charging for extra
phones because I vaugley remember asking the phone company to up the
power for the ringers and it was done free.

I also had what I think was a "Princess" touch tone phone, not sure
where I got it. For some reason I opened it up and saw a light bulb for
the buttons. I called the phone company and asked why my bulb won't
light and they told me they stopped supplying power for that. For free
they did send me a little wall wort type thing to plug in and hook up to
the phone so my light worked! I just saw it the other day, I think it
is "Western Electric" brand, damn, now I can't find it!

As a kid we had an outdoor phone ringer mounted to the chimmney which
was about the center of the house. I'm almost certain it was real Bell
of PA equipment. Our lot was a little over an acre and it could be
heard easily 1 or 2 houses away, and I don't think we paid monthly for
it. Just once for the bell and the hookup. That would drive me nuts if
my neighbor got one of them now, we had a large family so the phone rang
a lot! Gawd knows how many times we ran inside only to just miss the
phone, not to mention how many times the run included a trip and fall!


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.

I know some business' still have some real phones for in case their
system dies or the electric goes out. The bank of real phones still
works with no electric.