Not all you younguns will remember these things, so come sit by Gramma's rocker while she reminisces about 1979 with the help of these old AT+T videos. One is a recruiting spot for the Bell Labs, showing earnest young tech geeks and their bad hair talking about good places to work and good communities for their families. These cutting-edge careers involved things like computer-to-computer communications that were about to revolutionize data transport. The young technicians are cheerfully brisk about their career opportunities, without imagining that they're the center of the world.
The other video shows the happenin' new designer telephones, the kind you used to plug into a wall -- some even had a dial. The featured homes all look more like something out of Dallas or A Clockwork Orange than what I remember of homes back then, when I was a new college graduate. The phones are fun to look at, but it's the clothing that cracks me up.
7 comments:
I think those are actually the kind that had to be wired into the wall. The kind continued to be owned by the phone company (as it was part of the wiring, which they also owned), on which you paid rent every month.
When my grandmother died in the 1990s, we discovered she had been paying rent on an ancient AT&T phone of this sort for twenty years longer than everyone else.
Of course, hers was no "design line" phone. It was that plain black industrial phone with the bell that sounded like Doomsday.
I remember the Snoopy (C) phone! My grandparents had the heavy black one made of Bakelite the weighed about 10 pounds (or so it felt) and the ring would wake the dead. It looked like a prop from the Maltese Falcon or the Thin Man.
There's something to be said for a wired connected land-line phone when the power to the house goes out.
LittleRed1
The problem I had with those design line instruments, even then, was that they couldn't be pinched between my shoulder and ear while I took notes. Or kicked back in my chair for a long conversation with my then girl friend on the other end of the call.
Eric Hines
I recall the days of Ma Bell before phone deregulation. And I recall that your phone "options" were limited to what the phone company sold. I'm not talking call waiting... I'm talking the physical phone. Kids these days don't believe you when you tell them things like that. They can't conceive of it.
Ain't monopolies grand?
That's one of the things I like most about this video, really: that they're trying to sell the grand degree of personalization. "You can engrave anything you want on the factory-fitted brass plate." "You can put any kind of color swatch you want, provided you cut it to fit our phone as it comes from the factory."
Post a Comment