[1024core]

I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.

[aidenn0]

It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.

My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).

[xunil2ycom]

To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.

[spauldo]

Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge.

Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.