Tonya Canning
StacyRotary phone
Princess phone- rotary or touch dial
Cordless phone (still landline)
Cellular phone
Poll ended at .
Charlotte Walker@dancinyogi You testing the “Masto is Gen X” theory again? 😹
@purplepadma I swear, I"m a glutton for punishment after the nightmare of the typewriter poll. I doubt this one will get as much traction, thought!
🐍Everyone knows that GenX doesn't exist!
We all died from throwing lawn darts at each other, using construction sites as playgrounds, and being forgotten about for the weekend by our parents who told us to 'go out and play' Friday night, only for them to wonder where we were when it was time for school Monday morning... and if that didn't kill us, they took us to Action Park to finish the job!
Ricardus@6of47 @purplepadma @dancinyogi Guilty. I've done all of those things, and only managed to need a few hundred stitches over the years.
@Ricardus @purplepadma @dancinyogi The 1970s was a helluva time to be a child. It really is amazing that any of us survived to see adulthood.
@dancinyogi @6of47 @Ricardus I saw a playground last week where the roundabout was level with the ground, and the ground was that bouncy surface kids can’t hurt themselves on. In my day the roundabout was 2 feet off the ground and the surface was concrete, for maximum injury potential
@purplepadma @6of47 @Ricardus Yep. No soft wood chips to break a fall. We had something called 'Field Day' and had races around the circle where the buses parked. The circle was blacktop with pebbles and stones. I slipped, fell, and skinned both knees badly. Another girl slipped and ripped open her palm. Still, they had it every year.
Red_Shirt_no2@dancinyogi @6of47 @Ricardus @purplepadma
"To make the merry-go-round go faster
So that everyone needs to hang on tighter
just to keep from being thrown to the wolves."
AspiringLuddite@6of47 @purplepadma @dancinyogi
Construction sites were the best playgrounds.
And if the kids last night hadn't been chucking cement at the porta-loo I wouldn't have intervened.
It was very noisy.
@AspiringLuddite @6of47 @dancinyogi We played on building sites whenever we could. Now I come to think of it, I have no idea how we knew when it was time to go home for dinner as I don’t think we wore watches
@purplepadma @6of47 @dancinyogi
As feral children, we went home when we got hungry.
And we were often hungry. I mean, all that playing on building sites can make a child hungry.
Come to think of it, some of our purpose-built playgrounds resembled building sites.
@AspiringLuddite @6of47 @dancinyogi My next door but one neighbour ordered a large stack of bricks to be delivered to his garden. He was, he explained, going to build an extension. The extension never happened, but the pack of neighbourhood kids played on them for years
Mike Fraser@mike I am apparently a member and you know? Proud of it!
e Riley Casey@mike @dancinyogi
Welp Mastodon can be accessed on the web via desktop while Threads is phone app only so thats an age filter right there.
Welp Mastodon can be accessed on the web via desktop while Threads is phone app only so thats an age filter right there.
Buttery Mails🇨🇦@mike @dancinyogi THAT'S ME!
kechpaja@dancinyogi “Princess phone”? I’ve never heard that term before.
Mike McCaffrey 
gnate@mikemccaffrey @kechpaja @dancinyogi Nor had I , but I voted for it anyway. Closest to the slimline I had in my room. (Or the one-piece push button that hung up when you set it down.) Never did the cordless thing, but definitely saw (and used) rotary models in the early years.
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UKA compact telephone set with a light up dial (often powered by an external 110V to low voltage transformer), I think it was only available in the USA
Jules Sanders
Craig Froehle@vfrmedia @kechpaja @dancinyogi Ours all looked like this (in various colors; most were wall-mounted)
Bodger@dancinyogi I grew up with the Princess phone, that's the one I used as a teenager when I started making calls myself. The first phone I remember in the house was rotary though.
Joe Steinbring 
@dancinyogi We pretty regularly upgraded from rotary to touch dial to cordless. Still to this day, my parents have a rotary phone bolted to the wall in their laundry room from days where ma bell was the only one who was allowed to own phones and just rented one out to you.
John Beresford@dancinyogi Sounds like another way to confirm the "Mastodonians are old AF" theory to me, but I still got suckered into it 🤣
Nick W.@dancinyogi I said the Princess, but to be honest as long as I can remember (to the early-mid80s) we had a rotary phone, a touchtone phone that emulated rotary (the phone co didn't work with touchtone when my parents bought it) and a cordless phone (also set to emulate rotary)...
Barbara Monaco@dancinyogi Our family phones were rotary. We had two,
one in a upstairs hallway, and one in the kitchen. When I was small there was a party line. Our number was GR76-776.
GR stood for Greenwood.
Grandma lived on a farm. Early on she had a crank phone, the only one we kids had ever seen. At some point, maybe in the 60s, it was replaced by a black rotary model.
one in a upstairs hallway, and one in the kitchen. When I was small there was a party line. Our number was GR76-776.
GR stood for Greenwood.
Grandma lived on a farm. Early on she had a crank phone, the only one we kids had ever seen. At some point, maybe in the 60s, it was replaced by a black rotary model.
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖@dancinyogi Actually,our first phone didn’t have a dial; you picked up the handset and asked the operator to connect the number. My Uncle and Aunt were ‘PROspect 2192’
Book@dancinyogi Woah, how old are y'all?
@book Careful. Once we find our readers and read your reply, we'll come at you with all the strength our creaky knees can muster!
JD@dancinyogi I’m old enough to remember when the phone company supplied the phone. They were heavy enough to use as a weapon.
Benjamin Hollon 🇺🇸🇲🇾🇮🇳🇦🇫@dancinyogi
I only got a phone a couple years ago, age 17. My parents had cell phones when I was growing up.
I only got a phone a couple years ago, age 17. My parents had cell phones when I was growing up.
Zaya the Jew@dancinyogi Rotary here too, but damn, the average age of this place! 🤣 (Myself very much included and to be honest I think it's kind of cool.)
@dancinyogi Oh, also - what is a princess phone
Edelruth, PBS Passport HolderBakelite, of course.
Sean@dancinyogi Maybe I am gonna sound like a grumbling old man, but I think we were truly better off in many ways when our phones were stuck to the wall.
@seanb I think, like with a lot of technological advancements, we went too far with it.
snaprails@seanb @dancinyogi Since the last time all phones were stuck to the wall was the late 19th century I have to disagree. Unless you were/are filthy rich of course 😃
@snaprails @dancinyogi Really? Phones here in Canada were stuck to the wall well into the late 20th century (1980s). And that was for everyone, not just the rich, thank you very much. In addition, many rural Canadians still had party lines rather than private lines into the 1990s. Further, if my memory of history is correct, I would add that most people didn’t own a telephone in the late 19th century, except for the rich.
@seanb @dancinyogi All phones? No phones on desks, sideboards, telephone tables?
Jaakko Nissi@dancinyogi how are you gonna calculate how old people are by this poll? I'm a millennial and I grew up with a rotary phone.
DTMF came to rural Finland and took our rotary phones away sometime in the (mid-?)nineties.
@jiinissi I'm not doing this to calculate age. It's just out of curiosity.
@dancinyogi yeah, I was kinda kidding because of the previous comments about age.😅 Anyway it's interesting how much later DTMF was introduced here.
I remember this so well because I would have wanted internets, but we couldn't get a modem until the phone line technology was upgraded and I think we were out of luck still in 1994 when we got the Pentium 90.
DTMF was also only introduced in early-mid 1990s in the UK - we had this unusual low pitched dialling tone which was like an electromechanical cat purr; but it was so full of harmonics it upset the DTMF registers in the Telephone Exchange so the dial tone changed to 350+440Hz like in USA.
European countries which had a constant 400-420Hz dial tone weren't affected as much by this issue so some got DTMF slightly earlier//
Mark Lepper@dancinyogi So, it's hard for me to pick an answer because we had rotary phones, and also push button phones that had cords, and eventually cordless phones in my house. I didn't get a cellphone until after college, but my mom, who drove a lot for work, got a bag phone for her car for emergencies and we weren't ever allowed to use it.
Zonkerh@dancinyogi The first phone I remember at my grandparents house did not have a dial. It was a party line and you picked up the speaker, turned a crank, and asked an operator to connect you to someone.
#Lydia T. Pott@dancinyogi
We didn't have a phone when I was growing up.
We didn't have a phone when I was growing up.
mango 🐌@dancinyogi we had an AT&T cordless phone but touch tone dialing cost extra so the phone has to be set to pulse dialing for it to work properly.
Ellen Saunders@dancinyogi I know you’re probably just having fun but I stopped answering data-mining questions on Facebroke and the bird site so seeing them here just makes me wary.
@MulletBraid I am just having fun. But I get it.
Olympia Indivisible@dancinyogi First phone you had to talk to the operator. No rotary till a little later.
geobeck@dancinyogi
I'm impressed with the maturity of your following.
We had a rotary at home until I was 19. We probably would have kept it longer, but we moved.
Jeremy L Lawson ☕@dancinyogi We lived way out in the country when I was a kid so when we finally got a phone it was a party line for a short while and we had a rotary phone. This was in the early 80s.
BTW, this was my first modem. A whole 300 Baud. I still have it and the whole computer in storage.
Sjaak K. 🇳🇱🇪🇺🍋@sjaakkeuvelaar I am so surprised it took this long for someone to reply with that 🤣
Not with Stupid; I AM Stupid.@dancinyogi @KingShawn Magneto phone with manual telephone exchange