Pop Culture Retrospective #29 - Phone and Telecommunications Technology of the 80s & 90s!

I had a lot of hobbies as a child.  I loved riding my bike, skateboarding, staying up late with my sister to watch the free WDW promotional VHS tapes we often requested via snail mail (we watched them so much that we memorized them) and I also enjoyed eavesdropping on my sister.  When we eventually upgraded our landline phone, we went from a phone with a 4 ft cord to a cordless phone.  And of course, once we had that phone, my sister and I could sneak away from the kitchen where the receiver was located to talk to our friends in private.  As I mentioned in an earlier episode of the PCRP I was a big fan of walkie talkies growing up and I owned several.  One of them I found could intercept the signal from our cordless phone and thus, I could overhear conversations people had on the phone.  I thought my parent’s phone conversations were pretty boring, but I thought my sister’s were juicy. I enjoyed listening in on my sister’s conversations about her plans for the weekend, which boys she thought were cute and what she was planning on wearing to school the next day. At some point she found out that I was snooping in on her phone conversations and soon my genius scheme came to an end.  The ability to use traditional telephones and landlines was a huge part of me and my sister’s growing up.  Having a phone meant we could call our Grandparents to tell them about losing a tooth or how itchy we felt when we had the chicken pox.  Having a phone allowed us to make arrangements with our friends to plan a get together or the ability to RSVP to a birthday party when we received an invitation in the mail.  Further, having an answering machine allowed me to create really stupid greetings for callers leaving us a message.  My sister was the first one in our family to purchase a cell phone and she bought me a new cell phone when she thought mine was lame.  I guess what I am trying to say is that without a doubt, phones and telecommunications were an integral part of our growing up, even before cell phones.  

With that said, on today’s show we will be discussing phone technology and telecommunications of the 80s and 90s. This topic was actually inspired by a listener named Jackylyn who wrote me a really kind email about the show.  She has been enjoying the podcast, in particular the Michael Bolton show (which is episode #9) as she too is a very avid fan.  Thank you so much for your kind thoughts and suggestions, Jacklyn, it really means a lot.  This request fulfills the scope of the show - focusing on the pop culture topics that my sister was into or was exposed to during our growing up.  So grab your Zack Morris cell phone, your long distance calling card and some change for a payphone, here we go!

Hello and thank you so very much for tuning in to the Pop Culture Retrospective Podcast, a show inspired by, and in memory of, my big sister Rebecca and her love for all things pop-culture, especially the people, places and things of the 80s, 90s and early 00s.  My name is Amy Lewis and I am your captain aboard this pop culture time machine.  You are tuning in to Episode # 29 - Phone and Telecommunications technology of the 80s and 90s - and for those of us who grew up during this time period have seen how drastically things have changed.  On today’s show we will be discussing everything you ever wanted to know about the phone technology from yesteryear.  We will talk about landline phones, cell phones, pagers, answering machines, calling cards and much more!  

Let’s begin our trip to the past with the telephone.  As we all know, the telephone dates back over 100 years to inventors like Alexander Graham Bell.  The telephone was built off of the telegraph. We owe a lot to the telegraph, not just the inspiration for a telephone, but also, if you think of it, text messages that we use on a daily basis on our cell phones are derived from telegrams.   

Although the telegraph was a huge stride in communication, the hope was to figure out a way to transmit the human voice. Telephones evolved over time, at first the hearing or ear piece was separate from the receiver that a person would speak in to.  As technology progressed and more people had telephones within their own home, a lot of people were sort of embarrassed by the look of their phone.  So, people would purchase phone covers, such as a  creepy porcelain doll.  Later you could buy velvet covers.  I am not sure which is worse as I hate both porcelain dolls and velvet.  I can’t stand the feeling of velvet or the sound of someone running their hands along it.  It’s giving me a rash just thinking about it.

In 1949, a company called Western Electric released the model 500 phone which was the classic rotary or ro-ro as I like to say, phone, which was around for decades.  They were sold until 1982.  In 1959, the Princess design was released.  The phone was designed with women in mind and came in different colors like baby blue and pink and featured an oval shape.  In 1965, the Trimline phone design was released by AT&T.  It combined the dial and headset into one piece.  It sort of has a clamshell like design, meaning that the two pieces fit snuggly together and didn’t take up a lot of room.  Further, the phone added the pound sign key as well as the star key.  By 1969, at least 90% of US Households had a telephone.  Let’s go back to the 80s though for a second...in 1981 for example, you could purchase a Garfield phone.  Later you could get a Cabbage Patch phone, a Mickey phone and even a Lego phone.  Tyco introduced a lego phone that featured a slide out drawer for storage and extra blocks for replacement or presumably to play with while on the phone.  Further, also in the 1980s, people figured out what the heck to do with the # and * keys.  For example, if you hit *69 on your phone it would immediately call the most recent number dialed back and the # was often used to select something on a menu or to finish a call.  The 1980s also saw the birth of the cordless phone.  I believe we had 1 or 2 different versions of a cordless phone and having the flexibilty to take anywhere in the house which was really a game changer. We no longer had to worry about the cord getting all tangled or knocking stuff over when it was pulled off of the receiver.  

In the 1990s, we saw the release and popularity grow of the infamous see-thru phone.  Con-Air, the hair care brand company created the clear telephone where you saw the inner workings of your phone.  It typically either had a neon yellow or teal chord, and featured neon pink, green or yellow parts.  

One companion to landline phones had to be the infamous answering machine.  The orgins of answering machines actually dates back to 1900 and a Danish inventor named Valdemar Poulsen.  He showcased a product named the “telegraphone” at an exhibition in Paris.  He somehow figured out how to record sound on a wire with the aid of magnets.  Although it was an incredibly impressive creation that many felt would help many people, AT&T who really dominated the telecommunication industry at the time (and did so for decades) felt very threated by the answering machine as the company felt like answering machines would disrupt the use of telephones.  There was also fear that the answerinig machine would be used to record private or confidential conversations.  That being said, AT&T was working behind the scenes to create their own answering machine that they would offer to customers beginning in the 1950s.  The first successful answering machine was released around this time and it was called the Electronic Secretary.  

By the mid 1980s, answering machine technology progressed and as such, they were sold to the general public for a reasonable price to sales skyrocketed.  In 1984 for example, one millon answering machines were sold.  Some answering machines could only provide a message that no one was available and there was no ability to record.  Other models though allowed the use of a generic message - you have reached 376-4511 leave a message after the tone.  Further, you could also record your own personal greeting which I was somehow often given the task of in my family.  Sometimes I would speak in a weird accent which periodically offended people who called the house (sorry, I was young and stupid) and I distinctly remember recording attempted to record a message and my sister tickled me halfway through which left our message as:  we cannot come to the found right now, please leave a message after the bee hee heep ah” which my sister never let me live down.  I created a message to the tune of the song “Ben” which was originally performed by Michael Jackson when he was in the Jackson 5 as part of the Ben movie soundtrack.  I never actually saw that movie, still haven’t, apparently it’s about a rat?  So not sure why I chose that tune but alas I did and that was on my college dorm answering machine message forever.  I also recorded an answering machine message for my apartment that I lived in with 3 other girls during my time in the Walt Disney World College program.  It was set to the tune of Full House.  Which, again, doesn’t make a lot of sense because I was never a huge fan of the show but I guess we liked the theme song for whatever reason.  I guess what I am trying to say is that me and answering machines go wayyyyy back.  It was a lot of fun to creative a goofy answering machine greeting.  Some people liked to act like they were in fact picking up their phone when in reality it was a recording.  The phone would ring a few times and then all of a sudden you would hear:  “Hello?  Who is this?  What do you want?  Tricked you!  This is an answering machine you dummy.”  I couldn’t tell you how many times this happened to me when making a call.  

And while we are on the topic of landline phones, let’s discuss the significant expense that was - a collect call.  Collect calls were originally sort of referred to as a “reverse charge” phone call. A person would call the operator, then the operator would then call the other party to see if they would accept the call and subsequently the charge.  

The first toll-free phone service in the United States was called Zenith.  The caller would call and it would be answered by an operator.  The caller would then say “Zenith” which told the operator not to charge for the call.  It was intended to be used for emergencies for people who were in a situation where they didn’t have the money to cover the cost of a call.  It was extremely valuable for people who were in need of this service.  The California Highway Patrol also developed their own Zenith number to report emergencies along the highways there.  Unfortunately, people started using this service for non-emergencies like asking for the weather or inquiries about traffic tickets. 

In May of 1993, a company called MCI, a small telecom company, developed and executed 1-800 COLLECT.  The program was automated so the call charge was significantly less than other providers.  AT&T developed a competing service called 1800-OPERATOR.  Unfortunately, a lot of people called 1800 OPERATOR but spelled OPERATER on accident. 1-800 Collect would prove to be the lead company when it came to collect calls.  Collect calls played a pretty crtical role in my logistics as a tween. 

For example, when I was in middle school and went to maybe, say, the local library, if I needed a ride home I would need to use the pay phone once located in the main lobby of the library.  Sometimes I had the 25 or later 35 cents to may a call home.  However, sometimes I forgot change.  If that was the case I would call my parents collect.  There was one way though to get around having to have your parents pay for the collect call.  I think there were a lot of us kids who used this tactic and I’m sure adults did as well.  When you called 1800 Collect you were prompted to share your name so that this information could be conveyed to the receiver of the call so they could determine whether or not they should take it.  After all, they would be charged for the call so it was important people knew who was on the other end.  So, when I was prompted to say my name, I would say as fast as humanly possible:  “This is Amy, pick me up the at library at 6pm.”  And then within a few minutes, my mom would get a call from 1-800-Collect:  Hello, you have a message from:  “This is Amy, pick me up at the library.”  Do you accept this call?  And she would then deny accepting the call, she had all of the inforamtion she needed without actually speaking with me on the phone.  Genius.  My sister and I did this for years.  One fun fact I learned during my research is that at one point (and perhaps this is still true today) Mother’s Day is the day when the most phone calls are made compared to any other time of the year.  And conversely, Father’s Day was allegedly notorious for having the most collect calls.  I found that quite hysterical.  Although for whatever reason, I would definitely call my Dad if I was needing to get out of jail.  I’ve never been to jail and don’t plan on ever going to jail but I’m assuming my phone would get taken away if I did and I would definitely call my dad collect to help me get out! 

In addition to resources like 1-800 Collect, there were also information lines that you could call, also for a fee.  For example, if you needed to find the phone number for your local pizza shop but were too lazy to find your yellow pages (yellow pages, which are still in publication today, but not to the degree that they were decades ago) you could call 4-1-1 and speak with an operator who could look up the information for you and relay it to you.  My mom would get so irritated with me and my sister when we were teenagers whenever she got the phone bill.  “Why did you guys call 4-1-1 so many times?”  “Because I needed the number for blockbuster to see if they had an available copy of Grease in for me to rent, god Mom.  No big deal.”  Another one of my favorite pastimes was to call Movie Fone.  Movie spelled like Movie and Fone spelled like FONE, not PHONE.  The company was founded in 1989.   You could call on your phone to check the movie times and theatre locations for a movie you were interested in seeing.  All you had to do was use the keypad to enter in the first few letters of the movie.  So, as an example, by typing in 8482, I could determine the times and locations for the movie, Titanic.  The number was 800-777-FILM.  It was in operation until 2014 and is now apparently a entertainment hotline if you will, for adults.  Cough cough.  The original voice of Movie Fone was actually a co-founder of the company who worked there until 2013.  His name was Russ Leatherman.  This service and his voice were so memorable that it was all spoofed on an episode of Seinfield.  I enjoyed impersonating the greeting and did it all too often.  I think this was another frequent phone call my sister and I made which I’m sure annoyed the crap out of my mom because we could have just looked in the paper or called the local theatres but come on, I was a teeanger and wayyyy too lazy to go to that much effort. Apparently there is a Movie Fone website that is still active where you can review current movie releases and future releases.  

Another popular form of technology during the days of landlines, pay phones and collect calls were pagers.  As a matter of fact, the first record of a radio paging device came in New York in 1950.  

By approximately 1970, there were over 30k pagers in use.  And just like cell phones which we will discuss here in a little bit, when pagers were first released they were very large and unreliable.  However, by 1972 better pagers were being produced.  By the early 1980s, at least 1 million people were using pagers.  In case you are not familiar with what a pager is, it is a small electronic device (at it’s height I’d say a pager was about the size of a deck of cards, maybe a touch smaller).  It could clip on to your belt or pocket and was relatively light.  If someone needed to get a hold of you, they could call the number connected with your pager and you would get a “beep” where the callers number would flash along with a notification beep so you knew someone was trying to reach you.  In fact, a lot of people referred to pagers as beepers.  My dad was a salesman during the 70s, 80s and part of the 90s so he was a pretty early adopter of the pager or beeper.  My mom also had a pager so that we could get a hold of her if there was an emergency.  We would type in our home phone number along with a *911 if we needed her to get back to us right away.  By the 1990s, tens of millions of pagers were being used.  Of course professionals like those in sales or doctors had them, but they were also often used by drug dealers.  Pagers would soon start to go by the wayside in the early 2000s as cell phones starting gaining more and more traction.  

Now that we’ve discussed traditional phones, calling cards and pagers, let us touch on the ultimate stocking stuffer in 1998, calling cards.  In case you are not familiar, calling cards were sort of like long-distance phone call gift cards.  Before the days of cell phones, phone calls were all made using landline type phones and of course, there was a cost.  Calling long distance essentially means calling outside of your area code.  Long distance calls cost extra, especially if those calls were made during the day.  One of the significant benefits of a calling card were that they had a consistent, flat rate and they could be used at any hour of the day and the charges or deductions from the card would remain the same.  Cards were pre-paid and once you ran out of minutes on your card, the phone call would end.  Believe it or not, the origins of calling cards date back to the mid 1970s.  There was a coin shortage in Italy during this time and an idea sprung up that maybe it could be helpful to come up with a method to help people pay for phone calls when they didn’t have any money.  So, the concept of calling cards for the purposes of making phone calls was born.  One interesting thing I learned during my research is that part of the motivation for Italy to develop the calling card was to help with reducing vandalism at public pay phones.  About 10 years later, calling cards came to the United States in 1987 and people started using them at pay phones. The World Telecom Group was soon the leader behind the calling card and by the late 1980s and early 1990s - the phone calling card was starting to explode!

In 1990 the first non-magnetic based phone calling card launched which required an access number and pin.  I didn’t realize this, but the first iterations of the calling card were apparently similar to an actual credit card.  The ones I used during my younger days were the kinds with the code and pin number. Part of the reason for this shift is because a lot of cards got stuck in the pay phones so an alternative was desperately needed.  

By 1992, most major telecommunications companies had released calling cards.  Sales reached 12 million dollars that year.  Just one year later, sales exceeded 25 million and by 1994, 250 million.  But wait, there’s more...by 1996 sales were 1 billion and then 1997, oh man, 2 billion.  

With the advent of cell phones being on the rise, pre-paid cell phones became available in 2001.  With the option to utilize calling cards or pre-paid cell phones, many families opted to stop having long distance plans on their landline phones.  Calling cards and pre-paid phones could be found everywhere - like gas station and convenience stores.  My sister and I were often gifted calling cards if we were leaving on a trip and I spent my first few years of my career as a guide so having a calling card was really helpful so I could check in with my family while staying at a campground in the middle of nowhere or working at a summer camp.   What would ultimately lead to the demise of the calling card was the advent of pre-paid cell phones and the cell phone industry as a whole.  With that said, let’s talk about cell phones, shall we?

Cellular or cell phones were formally introduced to the general public in 1983 by the Motorola company.  The technology had been tested in Chicago, DC and even Japan in the late 1970s, but it didn’t start gaining traction until the early 1980s.  Originally, cell phones used analog technology which was often unreliable.  Static and noise interference were common.  At first cell phones were utilized in cars, it was fixed to the floorboards and a large antenna was needed to operate the phone which was often located on the back of the car or on the roof.  Having a car phone really showed off someone’s elite status….you could even purchase a fake car phone, which people did, so they too could look like they were a high-roller. For only 20 bucks they could look like someone important.  I am not sure why, but at one point we had a car phone, my dad was a salesman so perhaps it had to do with that.  I remember thinking it was pretty darn awesome but I believe it was pretty expensive to make phone calls on it and I had no one to call as I was pretty young when it was installed so I never used it.  In the mid 1980s, it cost several hundred dollars to purchase a car phone and almost 1000 according to some reports to install and it cost about $100 monthly.  

Eventually cell phones became more mobile, but they were heavy and the size of a suitcase.  The first ones used 1G technology and could handle about 100k phone users at a time.  Also by the mid 1980s, there were 3 cell phone retailers on top:  Oki, Motorola and Nokia.  The first consumer cell phone to be released was the Dynatex 8000x.  It weighed 2.5 lbs and the battery lasted a mere 20 minutes.  The phone would cost about 10,000 in today’s money.  At the end of the 1980s, 1989 to be exact, Motorola released the first flip cell phone called the MicroTac.  In 1992, Nokia released the Nokia 1011 it was the 1st handheld 2G phone.  In 1994 the Nokia 2110 came out with it’s famous ringtone PLAY CLIP.  Reminds me of Love Actually.  

In 1997 when I started high school, Siemens released the S10 which had the first color LCD screen.  2 years later in 1999, Nokia released the 3210 which sold over 160 million units! 2001 marked the launch of the first 3G network in Japan.  Just a year later, the first Blackberry was released.  2004 saw the release of the Razr phone by Motoroloa.  My sister purchased me a Razr phone in the mid 2000s as she couldn’t stand my old-school Nokia phone.  That was one of my favorite phones I’ve owned.  

2006 marked the release of the first ever smartphone, the N95 made by Nokia.  Just 1 year later, Apple released their first iPhone.  Slider phones came on the scene in 2008 by a company called HTC, I had one of those for many years before getting my first iPhone in 2011.  Likewise my sister had a slider phone for many years and absolutely loved it.  

When you think back on the history of cell phones, it’s sort of fascinating to note that cell phones were invented for people being able to speak verbally to each other and now we use said phones for so much more than that, However, much of it, it seems, is for doing anything but actually talking to other people.  It’s so crazy to me that technology has advanced so much in my lifetime (and I know a lot of generations can say this).  I didn’t grow up with social media or cell phones,  I didn’t have a cell phone until I graduated from college. I often resist change.  It took me a long time to get on board with digital cameras as I loved film and I didn’t think I needed a SmartPhone. I have been hesitant and resistant to social media at times. It’s fascinating that we are so easily connected with people and yet, we seem more disconnected than ever.  I sometimes yearn for the times when it was harder to get a hold of people, I feel like we made more of an effort to do so.  It felt like communication was all about quality, not quantity  And now that it’s so easy, we don’t connect like we used to.  I guess that’s why I find it so comforting to take a look back at the past.  Perhaps you too, feel the same way.

I hope you have enjoyed this look back on telephone and telecommunications technology of the 80s and 90s, inspired by an awesome listener named Jacklyn, thanks again! And of course, by my sister.  What we touched on with this show is just the tip of the iceberg, really.  We didn’t get to call waiting or caller ID which was an add-on to any landline phone plan or the early days of what we now know as FaceTime or Skype.  There is much more to explore but taking a look back at things like calling cards, movie fone and the infamous beeper were a blast, as always.

If you are enjoying the Pop Culture Retrospective Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Spotify or whichever podcast platform you use.  Please also rate the show as it helps direct more listens to this joyous show that travels down memory lane. You can contact me anytime, my email address is:  popcultureretrospective@gmail.com or you can follow me on Twitter, I’m @popcultureretro.  I hope you will join me for my next show where we will be discussing the CROW or BUSH. Until then, be kind, be safe and hold on to your memories.