12-02-2017, 11:57 AM
So I like phucking around with old fonez, right? I have a few Western Electric 701 and 702 Princess phones in various colors, and an Automatic Electric 182 Spacemaker in pink. Pink vintage phones are highly collectible, so that's what I bought.
Princess:
http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/w...ncess.html
Spacemaker:
http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/ae/ae183sm.html
Back in the day, it was illegal to connect any equipment to the phone lines unless you leased it from Ma Bell. The phone cops could tell if you had more phones on your line than you were renting by the number of ringers attached to the line. The Spacemaker, often called a "bar phone" because they were common in dive bars, didn't have an internal ringer, so people would use them to add extra extensions without paying the monthly rental fee.
As it turns out, these old phones work just fine with the VoIP service provided by cable companies today. The cable modem has circuitry to perform rotary dial pulse detection and ring the electromechanical bell in an old phone. You can even use a dialup modem over the digital phone line if you want.
The drawback to having a land line is that telemarketers hound the living shit out of you. The national Do Not Call list is useless because there's a loophole in the law for non-profits. There are two local call centers that each autodial me 5 times a day, 6 or 7 days a week. That's 70 times per week that my phone rings and it's not somebody I want to talk to. Asking them politely to remove your number from their list doesn't work, nor does chewing them a new asshole when you finally get fed up.
I bought a caller ID box and an answering machine to screen my calls. If it was one of the call centers or a number I didn't recognize, I'd ignore it. If they didn't leave a message, then they obviously weren't going to get a callback. I figured they'd give up eventually, but no. The goddamned phone still rang 10 times a day for months on end. I finally decided to get one of those TeleZappers that sends a disconnected signal to the autodialer. It arrived today, and is now installed. I'm hoping it'll help make old telephones great again.
Princess:
http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/w...ncess.html
Spacemaker:
http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/ae/ae183sm.html
Back in the day, it was illegal to connect any equipment to the phone lines unless you leased it from Ma Bell. The phone cops could tell if you had more phones on your line than you were renting by the number of ringers attached to the line. The Spacemaker, often called a "bar phone" because they were common in dive bars, didn't have an internal ringer, so people would use them to add extra extensions without paying the monthly rental fee.
As it turns out, these old phones work just fine with the VoIP service provided by cable companies today. The cable modem has circuitry to perform rotary dial pulse detection and ring the electromechanical bell in an old phone. You can even use a dialup modem over the digital phone line if you want.
The drawback to having a land line is that telemarketers hound the living shit out of you. The national Do Not Call list is useless because there's a loophole in the law for non-profits. There are two local call centers that each autodial me 5 times a day, 6 or 7 days a week. That's 70 times per week that my phone rings and it's not somebody I want to talk to. Asking them politely to remove your number from their list doesn't work, nor does chewing them a new asshole when you finally get fed up.
I bought a caller ID box and an answering machine to screen my calls. If it was one of the call centers or a number I didn't recognize, I'd ignore it. If they didn't leave a message, then they obviously weren't going to get a callback. I figured they'd give up eventually, but no. The goddamned phone still rang 10 times a day for months on end. I finally decided to get one of those TeleZappers that sends a disconnected signal to the autodialer. It arrived today, and is now installed. I'm hoping it'll help make old telephones great again.
