Recently, I was talking to a friend about the central role of the telephone in daily life before cellphones, and even before the era of the dial-up internet. More than the early internet, or even TV ...

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Before dial telephones, we made phone calls through an operator. You picked up the phone, there was no dial tone, and you talked to an operator who placed the call for you. This was the only way to ...

This puzzled me. This instruction might have been necessary decades ago, when the telephonic ecosystem was shifting from dialing to touch tone, but surely it is unneeded these days because all phones ...