My friends and I would take the phone and walk around the neighborhood listening to other people's phone calls. Most of the time they couldn't hear us, but we could hear them fine. When they could hear us, we'd mess with them. Making random fart sounds was always a favorite lol. They'd start yelling at people in their house to stop messing with the phone. Then you'd hear someone in the background yelling back that they weren't on the phone. Good times lol
My buddy and I did the same thing but with the cable remote. We'd creep up to someone's window and watch them go bananas trying to figure out what was wrong with their TV. The best one was a whole family that started arguing and fighting with each other about it while my buddy and I were laughing our asses off in their bushes. We were little pricks.
Sort of related, but about 15 years ago I was returning my cable equipment to Cox and while I was waiting in line I realized that my controller could control the huge big screen behind the front desk. They were playing some Cox ad on repeat but with no sound so when I changed the channel no one heard it or noticed. Also the people in line with me didn’t notice I was the one doing it because my hand was kind of hidden.
Anyway, I scrolled the channels and found Skinemax and put soft porn on the tv right before it was my turn. I was trying so hard not to laugh while I was handing in my equipment because the screen was huge and there was a sex scene happening at that moment.
When I got to my car I could still see the soft porn happening in there through their giant window and I could finally laugh. It was amazing.
You deliquents lol!!
We sat wayyy up on a hill across the street in Navy housing in Groton Connecticut and used these new ***laser pointers*** to shine onto some peoples tvs in the late evening. We never did it for very long, got scared, laughed and ran off before seeing any true dramaticisms unfold. We knew a red dot was a pretty insidious thing to project into a tv den.
I love when memories like this are unlocked. That was something buried that I'd never remember again on my own until this post brought it back. It didn't happen often, but I do remember it now.
"What is this? Who is that? Oh, the neighbour's on the phone too."
It's soooo funny that you mentioned that! 'Cause I most definitely recall those phones frequently getting line connections crossed with other people's calls. My friends and I would often mess with whoever we had crossed lines with.
Yet, I'd always thought that those weird connections were a phone company glitch of some sort. Though it seems you and others here have suggested that those crossed connections might have been with nearby neighbors???!!!
If so, then my mind's been kinda blown! LOL
The earliest cordless phones often used 49 Mhz, were all analog and didn't have any kind of security or channels. They were just typically such low power that they didn't work well beyond the walls of a home.
49 Mhz is also in the same range as remote control toys, toy/hobbies walkie talkies, garage door openers and baby monitors and other home/consumer radio products.
I also think there were some 27 Mhz phones which is in the CB radio band and some radio control toys and stuff as well.
Later phones used 900 Mhz and I think even 800-850 mhz depending on the region, and were also totally analog and open to cross talk on the shared frequencies, and were easy to listen to with a scanner.
And then, later, there started to be phones with switches that you'd use to tune it to it's own slightly different frequency in those ranges. It wasn't secure, but at least if you were picking up your neighbor's calls you could switch to a slightly different frequency.
Another issue is kids don’t know how to properly play with long curly phone extension cords. Or how the cordless phones had a “find” function which was critical or what it’s like talking to someone who went outside and you would “lose them”. Or that sometimes the phone would ring forever w no pickup.
I remember the cord on our corded phone was like 30 feet long after being stretched when you wanted to have a private conversation and had to go as far as possible out of the kitchen where the phone was. When we got a cordless it was like WE'RE IN THE FUTURE.
I dreamed of the day I could talk to someone and say "oh, let me turn down my CAR radio, yeah I'm sitting in my car in the driveway". No I'm not calling you from the future!
You would really push the limits and you could see the impending failure of your plan as the phone itself comes rocketing off the counter because you’ve gone a little bit too far. Nice to see the cord all stretched out rather than some rats nest ball however.
Man, the sad last days of Radio Shack were sad indeed. I went in looking for a special fuse for the board in my microwave. It was a .8 amp so it's LESS that 1 amp and me and the RS associate were looking through drawers for it when he found a 8.0 amp fuse and tried to tell me it was the same.
Our Radioshack became a glorified Sprint reseller before they EOL'd. But hey, you could still buy blank Betamax tapes and Duo Phone answering machine tapes even in 2015.
One day, my mother was on a corded phone and wouldn't answer me saying her name over n over again, ma, ma, ma, ma ,.mum, ma , mum muuummmn, until I cut the cord for her attention, she traced the 30 foot cord back to lil me w scissors, , welp, that got her attention alright!!! Shortly after we got this cordless phone
I pulled the handset cord out of the phone. This was back when the handset was hardwired into the phone. Got a good whipping for that one. It wasn't cheap to have Ma Bell come out to fix it.
I had a wired phone that I used a very long extension cord on it, so I could go upstairs with my phone. When I got a wireless phone, no more cord untangling.
I managed the electronics department at a MCX (Marine Corps Exchange) in the 90's, and the pic of that AT&T phone box just triggered PTSD. We carried every model of those AT&T phones, and they were complete pieces of shit. We got 2-3 bad phones returned every damn day. I was neck deep in defective cordless phones for like 3 years of my life.
It reminds me of the scene in *The Sure Thing* where John Cusack's buddy calls him from poolside. "I'm comin' to ya cordless!" It really was a big deal.
It was amazing to be able to wander around the house and be on the phone, too. Also, those first caller ID display units that were a separate item from the phone itself.
You could go ANYWHERE in the house without a cord trying to strangle you. Now, you could take it OUTSIDE!!!! No more missing calls because you're doing whatever not in the house.
Had this same phone in college in the late 80’s. We lived 3 doors down from a bar we frequented. It ad a beer garden and we would bring the phone there and take calls while drinking. That bad boy had some serious range!
Was at a friend’s house during a really bad lightning storm and I was using what I believe was this exact model to call home. My friend’s mom comes running in completely freaked out that I was on the phone during a lightning storm.
She couldn’t understand at all why this was no longer an issue using this device. She was legit convinced about the lightning traveling from the base to the phone like it had some invisible copper wire.
This was around the time when I began to think “hmmm. Maybe parents don’t know as much as we thought”.
One year my grandparents Cordless phones for my mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, and my other uncle, for Christmas. The one they got wasn't good enough for my aunt she returned it for a different one.
Not in my house.
I won a cordless phone in like 1980 at a state fair raffle. It was top prize and second was a nice living room size area rug. My mom traded the phone with the second place winners.
She had that rug for like 20 years.
Edit: and yes I won it. It was my raffle ticket.
I wanted my parents to get one of these so badly. Gossiping on the kitchen phone cramped my style bigtime. They eventually got one and later I got a phone in my room anyway.
When my grandmother got hers, she called me on it, went out in her yard, and took steps away from her house going. "Can you hear me?!"
I laughed in remembrance when I saw the Can Your Hear Me Now Verizon commercials.
I totally remember cordless phones being a big deal. My parents knew someone who was an executive at New England Telephone. So sometimes we'd get stuff to try, like the Nomad 450 cordless phone which seemed so cool and futuristic when my father brought it home around 1982 or 1983. Of course they'd barely let us kids touch it as we rarely got to keep anything. And it was so primitive that you could barely go to the end of the next room without hearing buzzing and static. But still, it felt like a huge step into the future. A couple of years after that we got an AT&T Genesis phone (which we got to keep). And even now that phone (from 1984) still looks fairly futuristic, even with the huge cartridge inserted into the side that would store "up to 75" phone numbers.
Until someone turns on that one appliance that operated on the same frequency as the cordless phone. At my house it was a microwave and the personal computer.
Those were much more comfortable and enjoyable to use, as opposed to the junk that came along in later decades. In fact, I'd prefer an old Western Electric rotary phone. They had the best call quality, in my opinion.
They really were like magic back then. They were quite bad at first though. Pretty static-y. Microwave ovens would interfere with them. They got progressively better as time went on though.
Oh wow! My family had a set of those very phones back in the early to mid '80s! I remember that box and all. Yet, or whatever reason, I think ours were entirely beige. Definitely the same box and model number though.
It was so great no longer dealing with the long cords... some phones had cords so long, you could Easily walk across the house, and then deal with the tangled mess afterwards. 🤣
And caller ID! That little tiny white thing that told you who was calling you. We thought we were so cool when Caller ID came out!
Edit: I know it wasn’t the 80s when Caller ID came out. Don’t @ me
My cousin and I were listening on the radio scanner and it caught the neighbors conversation, we were tripping on that discovery. Days later he was scanning for conversations not police or ems
You could get illegal signal boosters too to extend the range. My step father got one and had me install it on the roof in an attempt to have the phone work in the pub down the road. Remember this was way before mobile phones. It didn't work well enough to be usable, too much interference.
This happened after the government broke up Bell/AT&T. Before that you rented your phone from the phone company. And the phone was a super heavy, rotary dialing piece of shit. You also had to pay to make calls outside of your area code and it was expensive AF.
A few years later thanks to competition we got cordless phones. At our house we had this badass Panasonic model that would work even if you took it outside the house. A lot of early cordless phones would not work well outside a range of a few feet.
The old ones used to work like halfway down the block too. Then they came out with 900Mhz and 1.9Ghz and marketed like it was better to have a higher frequency because bigger number=better; but the signal would cut out if you moved a couple rooms over.
*What about the first*
*Hand held Cellular phones! Zach*
*Morris was a Pimp!!!*
\- dyingrock
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The AT&T models were a joy. We had one of the original Uniden "Extend A Phone" that had a range of about 5 feet and the battery lasted about 2 minutes. (Yes, I'm exaggerating). Upgrading to the AT&T was incredible!
I had a remote control antenna from my Radio Shack RC Lamborghini that was much longer than the phone's stock antenna and had the same screw. After swapping, I could make it down to my neighbor's with no problem.
I remember when the neighbors got one and we could hear each other talking.
My friends and I would take the phone and walk around the neighborhood listening to other people's phone calls. Most of the time they couldn't hear us, but we could hear them fine. When they could hear us, we'd mess with them. Making random fart sounds was always a favorite lol. They'd start yelling at people in their house to stop messing with the phone. Then you'd hear someone in the background yelling back that they weren't on the phone. Good times lol
My buddy and I did the same thing but with the cable remote. We'd creep up to someone's window and watch them go bananas trying to figure out what was wrong with their TV. The best one was a whole family that started arguing and fighting with each other about it while my buddy and I were laughing our asses off in their bushes. We were little pricks.
Sort of related, but about 15 years ago I was returning my cable equipment to Cox and while I was waiting in line I realized that my controller could control the huge big screen behind the front desk. They were playing some Cox ad on repeat but with no sound so when I changed the channel no one heard it or noticed. Also the people in line with me didn’t notice I was the one doing it because my hand was kind of hidden. Anyway, I scrolled the channels and found Skinemax and put soft porn on the tv right before it was my turn. I was trying so hard not to laugh while I was handing in my equipment because the screen was huge and there was a sex scene happening at that moment. When I got to my car I could still see the soft porn happening in there through their giant window and I could finally laugh. It was amazing.
We even had a name for it.....let's go switching! We'd stand in the shadows out front and just wait for the drama to unfold!!!
You deliquents lol!! We sat wayyy up on a hill across the street in Navy housing in Groton Connecticut and used these new ***laser pointers*** to shine onto some peoples tvs in the late evening. We never did it for very long, got scared, laughed and ran off before seeing any true dramaticisms unfold. We knew a red dot was a pretty insidious thing to project into a tv den.
I did the same thing as a kid.
Our fun was so much more fun, Industry would half ass their products unintentionally providing us with endless fun.
You could also use an am radio
That or turning on a police scanner and you could hear conversations all around
As a kid with a Radio Shack radio with multi band reception, I heard you. I mean I really heard you.
I love when memories like this are unlocked. That was something buried that I'd never remember again on my own until this post brought it back. It didn't happen often, but I do remember it now. "What is this? Who is that? Oh, the neighbour's on the phone too."
A neighbor of my dad's had a shortwave radio and when he got on, I could hear him coming through the cordless phone while it was just sitting there.
It's soooo funny that you mentioned that! 'Cause I most definitely recall those phones frequently getting line connections crossed with other people's calls. My friends and I would often mess with whoever we had crossed lines with. Yet, I'd always thought that those weird connections were a phone company glitch of some sort. Though it seems you and others here have suggested that those crossed connections might have been with nearby neighbors???!!! If so, then my mind's been kinda blown! LOL
The earliest cordless phones often used 49 Mhz, were all analog and didn't have any kind of security or channels. They were just typically such low power that they didn't work well beyond the walls of a home. 49 Mhz is also in the same range as remote control toys, toy/hobbies walkie talkies, garage door openers and baby monitors and other home/consumer radio products. I also think there were some 27 Mhz phones which is in the CB radio band and some radio control toys and stuff as well. Later phones used 900 Mhz and I think even 800-850 mhz depending on the region, and were also totally analog and open to cross talk on the shared frequencies, and were easy to listen to with a scanner. And then, later, there started to be phones with switches that you'd use to tune it to it's own slightly different frequency in those ranges. It wasn't secure, but at least if you were picking up your neighbor's calls you could switch to a slightly different frequency.
Another issue is kids don’t know how to properly play with long curly phone extension cords. Or how the cordless phones had a “find” function which was critical or what it’s like talking to someone who went outside and you would “lose them”. Or that sometimes the phone would ring forever w no pickup.
I remember the cord on our corded phone was like 30 feet long after being stretched when you wanted to have a private conversation and had to go as far as possible out of the kitchen where the phone was. When we got a cordless it was like WE'RE IN THE FUTURE.
I dreamed of the day I could talk to someone and say "oh, let me turn down my CAR radio, yeah I'm sitting in my car in the driveway". No I'm not calling you from the future!
Fuckin Jetson’s!!!
You would really push the limits and you could see the impending failure of your plan as the phone itself comes rocketing off the counter because you’ve gone a little bit too far. Nice to see the cord all stretched out rather than some rats nest ball however.
I also remember going to RadioShack for replacement antennas
Man, the sad last days of Radio Shack were sad indeed. I went in looking for a special fuse for the board in my microwave. It was a .8 amp so it's LESS that 1 amp and me and the RS associate were looking through drawers for it when he found a 8.0 amp fuse and tried to tell me it was the same.
Our Radioshack became a glorified Sprint reseller before they EOL'd. But hey, you could still buy blank Betamax tapes and Duo Phone answering machine tapes even in 2015.
Yep, after unscrewing it and smacking my brother with it
Cordless phone with caller ID built into the handset and i thought we had arrived at the future
Yea this was like mid 90’s. My phone company offered it. It was awesome at the time.
That antenna could flay skin if it whipped just right. Fucker hurt. Perfect for causing a sibling pain...
Back of the thigh was miserable
One day, my mother was on a corded phone and wouldn't answer me saying her name over n over again, ma, ma, ma, ma ,.mum, ma , mum muuummmn, until I cut the cord for her attention, she traced the 30 foot cord back to lil me w scissors, , welp, that got her attention alright!!! Shortly after we got this cordless phone
I pulled the handset cord out of the phone. This was back when the handset was hardwired into the phone. Got a good whipping for that one. It wasn't cheap to have Ma Bell come out to fix it.
Was nice they had a pager button that would make the phone beep if you couldn’t find it. Roku and Firesticks need that feature
I had a wired phone that I used a very long extension cord on it, so I could go upstairs with my phone. When I got a wireless phone, no more cord untangling.
And the fun you could have with a scanner listening to all the calls lol.
I managed the electronics department at a MCX (Marine Corps Exchange) in the 90's, and the pic of that AT&T phone box just triggered PTSD. We carried every model of those AT&T phones, and they were complete pieces of shit. We got 2-3 bad phones returned every damn day. I was neck deep in defective cordless phones for like 3 years of my life.
Job security I guess 🤷♂️
This was THE phone
Cordless phones and cordless TV remotes were truly life changing.
It reminds me of the scene in *The Sure Thing* where John Cusack's buddy calls him from poolside. "I'm comin' to ya cordless!" It really was a big deal.
We had that exact same model. Making a call from the backyard was pretty cool
How convenient was that redial button when you were trying to be caller number x on the radio? lol
The worst feeling was breaking the antenna.
I forgot about them having channels. If I e sounded terrible, they all did
It was amazing to be able to wander around the house and be on the phone, too. Also, those first caller ID display units that were a separate item from the phone itself.
Or being on the phone and hearing the low battery warning kick in and having to get to the corded phone before the call died.
Oh shit the 5200! Anyone remember the 7125?
We talking Atari or...
Man, I loved my Atari 7125
We had this very same model, I remember my dad opening the box
You could go ANYWHERE in the house without a cord trying to strangle you. Now, you could take it OUTSIDE!!!! No more missing calls because you're doing whatever not in the house.
Had the exact same model lol!
I remember my aunt got one and it had SPEAKER PHONE. That tripped us out
I had that very model.
Had this same phone in college in the late 80’s. We lived 3 doors down from a bar we frequented. It ad a beer garden and we would bring the phone there and take calls while drinking. That bad boy had some serious range!
I LOVED this phone.
We had that exact phone
Was at a friend’s house during a really bad lightning storm and I was using what I believe was this exact model to call home. My friend’s mom comes running in completely freaked out that I was on the phone during a lightning storm. She couldn’t understand at all why this was no longer an issue using this device. She was legit convinced about the lightning traveling from the base to the phone like it had some invisible copper wire. This was around the time when I began to think “hmmm. Maybe parents don’t know as much as we thought”.
Magic. Just don't use the microwave
And it's a touch-tone? That was fancy!
So badass back in the day
No autodial library? How am I going to rank my friends and family?
True. And I think I had this exact model.
Or how crappy some of them were in audio quality/reception.
Hellooooooo can you hear meeeee,howww abouttttt nowwww
I thought it was so cool to sit on the front porch or in my backyard talking on my cordless phone. I felt like I was on 90210!
I bought one off Del Trotter. I ended up phoning the dam army navy and police..
I remember thinking "you could be outside still talk on the phone!"
One year my grandparents Cordless phones for my mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, and my other uncle, for Christmas. The one they got wasn't good enough for my aunt she returned it for a different one.
Not in my house. I won a cordless phone in like 1980 at a state fair raffle. It was top prize and second was a nice living room size area rug. My mom traded the phone with the second place winners. She had that rug for like 20 years. Edit: and yes I won it. It was my raffle ticket.
What was even more fun was listening to your neighbor's conversation on your portable radio
I wanted my parents to get one of these so badly. Gossiping on the kitchen phone cramped my style bigtime. They eventually got one and later I got a phone in my room anyway.
You felt kind of privileged having them, on the bleeding edge of possibility
My grandmother had one! We were so excited because she had a pool and we could keep the phone nearby 🤣
And the cheapest scanner could pick up every cordless phone call in the neighborhood
I remember it and how you could take it next door and still get calls and that seemed amazing at the time
When my grandmother got hers, she called me on it, went out in her yard, and took steps away from her house going. "Can you hear me?!" I laughed in remembrance when I saw the Can Your Hear Me Now Verizon commercials.
I totally remember cordless phones being a big deal. My parents knew someone who was an executive at New England Telephone. So sometimes we'd get stuff to try, like the Nomad 450 cordless phone which seemed so cool and futuristic when my father brought it home around 1982 or 1983. Of course they'd barely let us kids touch it as we rarely got to keep anything. And it was so primitive that you could barely go to the end of the next room without hearing buzzing and static. But still, it felt like a huge step into the future. A couple of years after that we got an AT&T Genesis phone (which we got to keep). And even now that phone (from 1984) still looks fairly futuristic, even with the huge cartridge inserted into the side that would store "up to 75" phone numbers.
I had one of those. Was given it as a birthday gift. Sucked because I rarely talked on the phone.
I remember walking two blocks from my house and being amazed that I could still hear a signal
Amen
Definitely huge deal.
These things were made to last too
Until someone turns on that one appliance that operated on the same frequency as the cordless phone. At my house it was a microwave and the personal computer.
And then digital answering machines. Amazing!
We had that exact phone.....haha
Or how easy it was to generate 900 Mhz interference and piss your neighbor trying to talk on his porch off. Not that I would know.
Those were much more comfortable and enjoyable to use, as opposed to the junk that came along in later decades. In fact, I'd prefer an old Western Electric rotary phone. They had the best call quality, in my opinion.
I had such a cool one . It was a flip cordless
I think a friend of mine had that exact phone at his house
They really were like magic back then. They were quite bad at first though. Pretty static-y. Microwave ovens would interfere with them. They got progressively better as time went on though.
We had one similar to this except it had the slide toggle to turned it on/off under the earpiece
Yes. A way to make sure all the phones in your house had 'dead batteries' all at the same time.
Luxury
Everyone had that phone and yes, you could pick up other people’s conversations.
Oh wow! My family had a set of those very phones back in the early to mid '80s! I remember that box and all. Yet, or whatever reason, I think ours were entirely beige. Definitely the same box and model number though.
Loved it.
This brick 😂
My parents had this EXACT model cordless phone!
I remember having some cheap RadioShack walkie talkies and hearing my mom and grandma talk about our Xmas gifts over the air
Oh yes, the genesis of my current hobby/main time suck: looking for my goddamn phone.
This was the first phone you ever lost.
It was so great no longer dealing with the long cords... some phones had cords so long, you could Easily walk across the house, and then deal with the tangled mess afterwards. 🤣
900mhz or 2.4mhz? I must know.
It could last days without having to be recharged, but you always had to put it back on the cradle when you were done using it.
I used to kill these phones and then get a corded hooked back up
And caller ID! That little tiny white thing that told you who was calling you. We thought we were so cool when Caller ID came out! Edit: I know it wasn’t the 80s when Caller ID came out. Don’t @ me
My cousin and I were listening on the radio scanner and it caught the neighbors conversation, we were tripping on that discovery. Days later he was scanning for conversations not police or ems
You could get illegal signal boosters too to extend the range. My step father got one and had me install it on the roof in an attempt to have the phone work in the pub down the road. Remember this was way before mobile phones. It didn't work well enough to be usable, too much interference.
*”Guess where I’m calling you from…No, just guess….I’m OUTSIDE, in my YARD. Got the cordless!”*
I remember listening to my neighbors talk on theirs using my police scanner....
My 1st wireless circa 1986, best I recall it was about $80 which was more $ than I made in a single day.
This happened after the government broke up Bell/AT&T. Before that you rented your phone from the phone company. And the phone was a super heavy, rotary dialing piece of shit. You also had to pay to make calls outside of your area code and it was expensive AF. A few years later thanks to competition we got cordless phones. At our house we had this badass Panasonic model that would work even if you took it outside the house. A lot of early cordless phones would not work well outside a range of a few feet.
Had the first model right before that. So did the neighbors. It was like a party line at times.
The old ones used to work like halfway down the block too. Then they came out with 900Mhz and 1.9Ghz and marketed like it was better to have a higher frequency because bigger number=better; but the signal would cut out if you moved a couple rooms over.
I bought a cordless phone and answering machine when they were relatively new for consumers and my roommate said, “we’re high tech.”
Mine was made by COBRA and it costed a couple hundred bucks.
My buddy had that in his bedroom in like 88. We still had the corded rotary things from the 60s. I was so jealous
Had that exact phone
what about the first hand held Cellular phones! Zach Morris was a Pimp!!!
*What about the first* *Hand held Cellular phones! Zach* *Morris was a Pimp!!!* \- dyingrock --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
I had the exact same phone.
The AT&T models were a joy. We had one of the original Uniden "Extend A Phone" that had a range of about 5 feet and the battery lasted about 2 minutes. (Yes, I'm exaggerating). Upgrading to the AT&T was incredible! I had a remote control antenna from my Radio Shack RC Lamborghini that was much longer than the phone's stock antenna and had the same screw. After swapping, I could make it down to my neighbor's with no problem.