its profound how the cell phone changed the world.
 

i was just explaining to a young person, a prepaid phone card. hahahhaha..

the look on her face. i stopped the story short before i had to explain a collect call. i didnt give it much thought until just now when i had to call an employee that is off on vacation in Michigan. i just called. no fanfare.

i remember phone cards and collect calls. phone cards had to be the early 1990's??

what about prison? do they still make collect calls from prison?

Dude, prison is connected, hooked up, and under ground.....

Try explaining that in order to make a phone call....a person had to say the three digit number to a lady. If out of the area..also give the city and state. (before waiting for a line)

My phone number was 324.
A few later years...they came out with the rotary dial phone. :)

oh yea. the phone operator!!! wow. i vaguely remember that...i was a tiny kid.

remember a phone number that you called to get the time and date? faack. Popcorn? i think the number was popcorn. 767-2676.

There is a company called ICS Solutions that I believe is nation wide. They do the telephone stuff for jails.

I do video chats with clients and if the client has their account set up they can call me. ICS also does inmate calls to family.

I'm quite certain they are making loads of money on this operation.

Another thought on this... We were in Ireland and England in 1998. Everyone had cell phones. I remember in the US we paid by minutes with roaming charges and not everyone had a cell phone.

Yes, profound.

The CMOS sensor incorporated into cell phones has also had a profound impact.

I have met and visited with one of the key players in the development of the latter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Fossum

Great guy.

Working with students now at my alma mater.

the depth of knowledge in this group is also profound. thanks.

Adding to my thoughts about England. I lived there between 1988 and 1990. BT owned everything and even at a phone box you were charged by time regardless of where you were calling.

Even more bizarre was the phone prefix for your area. If calling home from one town to your home you would have a prefix that was different if calling home from another town.

I think ours was (area code)-1212 (might have been the number for information?)

Remember Lily Tomlin on the TV show Laugh In as the phone switch board operator ? Good stuff

i have the oldest desk phone in my office. it has that shoulder pad thing. hahah..i checked and it has a dial tone. it has rang in years i bet.

My mother worked for MI Bell in her 20's as an operator. 1940 till almost 1950
I remember her saying how hectic it could get at times.

Lily Tomlin

https://youtu.be/RT4__Nz5HWY?t=7

Ah, the real good old days when I remember my parents and grandparents talking into a wall phone where they picked the ear piece off a cradle, put it to their ear and talked onto a cone shaped microphone sticking out of the front of the phone. That was after they turned the crank on the side of the box to ring the local operator. High tech in those days in Illinois of the early 40s. I wonder what someone will say in another 3/4+ of a century. I'm sure it will be equally unconceivable now.

I read an interesting article a while back, can't remember the name. It was about how hard it is to write detective stories set in the present, where you can reach anyone at any time, and get backgrounds on anyone with the click of a key.

Cell phones and the Internet, profound impact, to be sure.

How do they compare to TV?

How about radio?

The automobile?

Another thing that's kind of crazy to think about is that not everyplace has indoor plumbing or electricity. I was in the Amazon in 2012, I think. The leader of Brazil was leading some change to try to get electricity to everyone.

Yup. Now you get the propaganda machine at your finger tips. But not only do you pay for it monthly, but you paid a chuck of change for the actual phone!

Pay phones, too. And pagers/beepers.

Pay your dime, and dial up the (local) phone number. Have more change ready, in case your phone conversation ran long. Where would poor Superman change from Clark Kent these days?

And in the time of pagers before cell phones, you'd get a page (invariably in a not-so-nice part of town) and then maybe have to find a pay phone to return the call.

i slept in a villiage in Cambodia where they had a big V8 spinning the generator that powered everything. at a certain time, you hear it shut off and everything went dark. everyone had headlamps. it was awesome.

i remember some locals had cell phones.