|
Posted by on November 21, 2007, 5:22 pm
If you were Registered and logged in, you could reply and use other advanced thread options
> I was an undergrad at Yale from 1971-1975. Dorm phones were part of
> the university's large Centrex system. If you wanted a phone, you
> went down to the phone office and signed up for one, billed monthly by
> SNET, the phone company. There was a special rate which as I recall
> was slightly cheaper than the normal POTS rate.
Yes, at my college it worked the same way. I was surprised that dorm
residents paid the residential rate even though they technically had a
business phone as part of the university Centrex. That meant they
could dial 4 digits for other unviersity extensions and be reached in
the same way. (They had to dial 9 for an outside line). Back in the
days when a message unit meant something, having that feature saved
many units and thus money.
It's funny looking at my college yearbook and seeing pictures of the
faculty offices. All had a black rotary 6 button keyset. The rent
for all those key systems must have been enormous. The university had
just cut in a new Centrex when I arrived and the operators were
instructed to push the direct dial number on callers. I wonder when
they replaced with rotaries with more modern sets and how many
generations of telephone sets have been used since then.
> This was back in the era when Ma only let you attach Her phones to Her
> sacred wiring, but I did my share of informal splices in the basement
> so people in adjacent rooms could share a phone line. Most rooms had
> either a phone or an illegal extension, and nobody used the few pay
> phones for incoming calls.
The trouble with that was settling up toll charges. Lots of roommates
got into disputes over who made what toll calls. When a phone could
be used by people in another room or freely in a dorm, abuse is very
possible.
| ![[Telecom] Re: Telephones and dorm rooms](/images/header.jpg)
NewsGroups 
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML site map