5 ‘high-tech’ gadgets from days of yore

There’s a pay phone in downtown Lancaster that I walk past, and it looks so lonely. No one ever uses it, and I was kind of curious why it is still there. You don’t see pay phones around much anymore, and you certainly don’t see traditional phone booths.

I decided to take a look at some of the other things I miss from “the good ol’ days.” Technology has advanced to the point where not only are pay phones disappearing, but house phones as well, which brings me to my list of five things I miss:

Rotary phones

The advance toward touch-tone technology was not just a great thing for us, but for those in the entertainment field. Do you know how much time was wasted in films and television shows by people having to run to find a phone (there were no cell phones) and then dialing seven numbers, waiting for the dial to return each time before dialing the next number? People had to die very slowly back then so they could survive the long wait for the paramedics to arrive.

Take something like the “Harry Potter” movie series that is 10 hours and eight minutes in length. If they had to use a rotary phone every time they needed to make a call to order up some eye of newt, that series would be at least 12 hours long.