In the 70s, my grandmother had a rotary desk phone.
It was in the back hall of the house, and it was rare that anyone ever used it. Not because it was rotary, but because telephoning a person was not a common thing in our family at that time. Many people we knew didn't even have a phone.
At our house, we had a wall mounted touchtone phone. It wasn't until the 80s that it was getting a lot of use. Mostly by me, in high school.
More foreign concepts for today's generation:
In the late 80s/early 90s I had two copper phone lines at my parents house; one was dedicated for the computer modem at a blazing 4800 baud. I got a subscription to Computer Shopper and was quickly hooked on the BBS hobby scene. I built a new PC clone, stepped up to a 14.4 modem and started hosting a local BBS.
Yes, one phone line meant one customer at a time. But there were only about 12 people in town who had both the hardware and the interest, so demand was low.
Try today telling somebody that they will have to wait "a few minutes" for an image to load, or "about an hour" for an audio file. Heck - In the time it would have taken to download a feature movie, you could have gone on location and filmed it yourself!
In a year or two, there were about 4or 5 BBSes running around the county, now on 56k modems. Still a small community of people, and we all knew each other. I remember the day one of my friends, a college student who also ran a BBS, planned a sysop meeting at his house because he had "unbelievable news" for us.
That night, we all stood around his desk as he dialed into the college network, then accessed this new thing called "the internet*". Our first site visited: Lamborghini. We all stood there gape jawed in amazement as our computer was downloading information from Italy - without having dialed a phone number in Italy.
Apparently I am still hooked on BBSs... I'm here almost every day.
* I think we were still calling it "the world wide web" back then. CRS.
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