Something old and something even older. These are two items I couldn’t part with when recently cleaning out a box of old cables and gadgets.
That device on the left is called a “telephone”, possibly unrecognizable to some. The one on the right is a TI SR-11 calculator.
@ronguest Ha! I think I still have my grandparents’ old rotary phone that was my first telephone (though I’m not sure…it may finally have gotten disposed of). You could have used that thing to kill someone; it was a tank.
@ronguest That's a "Princess" phone, modern in its time compared to the blocky standard phones also supplied by Bell. The old Bell phones were very solidly built because they were supplied with your phone service rather than bought by the customer: If you discontinued service, they collected the phone and gave it to someone else, so durability was desireable.
The transition from dial to "pulse" mode was disruptive for users who didn't want to switch. For many years, my mother used a converter that turned her dial signal into something usable by the newfangled push-button technology.
@macgenie Haha! That was a but before my time (although I did live through the “nationalization” of the campus phone system by the proto-IT department as an undergrad…needless to say, that did go well, and I doubt it was a good long-term investment, considering what’s happened to phones…).
