Old Tech from the 1990s

I came across this the other day in a box of some of my 'old tech'. 

How many people reading this post used something like this?

 "Back in the day", the 1990s I'm talking about here. 

It doesn't seem like a long time ago just thinking about it, but it sure was! 20 years ago now! 

This was an era that can't be hardly remembered on calling people because everybody has cell phones, but still, this was quite a while before everybody started to use cellphones. 

Pay phones were the rule back then and pay phone gadgets like this one became available to help you 'speed dial' your way to a phone call. 

For me, I found and bought, I think it was around $15.00 for this device, because quite often when I was out at night and 'on-call' I'd get a page (with the on call "beeping" pager) and had to go find a pay phone and call in to get the new call, it was a lot of phone numbers! This was several years before everyone was issued portable radios at work so after hours you had to call everyplace, there was no radio dispatch for our department at night.

This is even back before PDA's (Personal Data Assistant, we went through those too) so you still had to have a little carry around phone book or note pad with all the numbers you needed to make the calls.

So, how did this thing work?

Well the top photo is of the back of the device and the speaker and the bottom photo is of the dialer keypad. 

You would take the time to go through and enter all the numbers you wanted to into the device, and it took time to enter them! You had 60 places in memory for numbers.

After all numbers were entered, you, or me in my case, would walk up to the pay phone put the dialer speaker up to the mouth piece on the handset and press the saved number. Some pay phones I remember having to put a dime in but some you didn't especially if dialing a toll free number, like our department number was.  Or with this dialer, the first two places being for my "calling card" that you bought minutes to make paid calls.

The dialer then made all the tones and the call would be connected and you'd just start to talk, when it was answered, just like you'd spent the time to dial it. But with this you didn't have to remember hundreds of numbers just push the numbers of the saved space like 0-1 or 2-4. Then just put the device back in your pocket until the next time. It was really a fancy time saver and number memory.

 

I ultimately upgraded to a 'newer' version, also a Radio Shack brand, that dropped the flip cover but did the same job. I used them almost all the time back then, I got to the point of putting almost every number I regularly called in them. Nowadays my phone can store more phone numbers than I'll ever call as well as call them too if I wanted. And that's why it's often very hard to find a pay phone anymore! But back in these 'early days' when digital was just starting to worm into our lives, gadgets like this were out if you wanted to buy them! And I remember Radio Shack being at the forefront of "off the wall" tech like this back in those days. I was an often shopper back then at the local Radio Shack store.