This takes me back! In the 1980s, I lived in a small town, and my Dad learned that the phone company still offered "party line" service for cheap - you could share a piece of copper with everyone on your street. I guess for most of the 20th century there were social norms about how to ask to use a shared phone line, how to know if a call was for your house instead of for a neighbor's house, etc - but by 1980 or so, everybody had household-private lines. So my Dad's insight was that he could save some bucks by paying for party-line service and we'd be the only house using it, so it would be de-facto private. But the side effect was that, since it meant we were using antique hardware at the phone company, it didn't support touchtone dialing! So we kept some 1960s-era rotary phones around, and when we got new phones we had to find the little hidden "tone/pulse" backwards-compatibility switch on the handsets (and my geeky friends would come over, click the touchtones back on, try to use the phone and say "hey, your phone is broken!" dude, you broke it. Presaging a long career in tech support, I suppose)
We had to switch to modern lines after we got a 1200 bps modem. Someone from the phone company called and said "you've connected an electronic device to the party line, that's not allowed, 'cause how would your neighbors let you know they need to use the line?" apparently the argument "we're the only house on this line!" was not convincing. So touchtones started working, and presumably Southern Bell got to retire the last party line hardware at the switching station.
So I've long wanted to do some kind of hacking with a rotary phone! I've seen lots of DIY projects that use analog phones as audio inputs, but they almost never including dialing, so this is exciting to see! I've always assumed you'd have to build your own pulse-counting circuit, I had no idea there was a commercial option, that's kind of mind-blowing, but I suppose they were needed to support old hardware.
We had to switch to modern lines after we got a 1200 bps modem. Someone from the phone company called and said "you've connected an electronic device to the party line, that's not allowed, 'cause how would your neighbors let you know they need to use the line?" apparently the argument "we're the only house on this line!" was not convincing. So touchtones started working, and presumably Southern Bell got to retire the last party line hardware at the switching station.
So I've long wanted to do some kind of hacking with a rotary phone! I've seen lots of DIY projects that use analog phones as audio inputs, but they almost never including dialing, so this is exciting to see! I've always assumed you'd have to build your own pulse-counting circuit, I had no idea there was a commercial option, that's kind of mind-blowing, but I suppose they were needed to support old hardware.