9600 baud modem! You kids had it easy. I was using a 300 baud modem. It was perfect for me because I can read about as fast as the data speed and hardly ever have to pause.
I remember the first time I had a phone that wasn't a rotary phone. It had the 12 buttons on it. You know what? It still rotary dialled. When I press a 5, I can hear it click 5 times. We didn't have proximity sensors on our phones back then to turn off the input. The buttons were up against your face when you are on the phone. If you press the phone against your face too hard, it would dial and you would have to wait through the clicks before you can talk again. This phone of mine has a redial button, too. The problem is when you accidentally hit it while already on a call and you have to wait for all 7 numbers to click through before you can continue talking.
We had 7-digit phone numbers back then and we had to remember them. We didn't have this fancy speed dial or smart dial where you can partially enter the number and the phone figures out what you wanted to dial.
In order to find out who was calling you, you actually have to answer and talk to the person. If you didn't want to talk to that person, you had to actually come up with an excuse to hang up. We didn't have this ignore feature on our phones. If we didn't want to answer the phone, we had to listing to the phone ring several times until the caller got tired of waiting and hang up.
We didn't have voice mail back then. We had to get someone else in the house to answer the phone and take the message.
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