21 May
2009
21 May
'09
1:27 a.m.
----------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 15:56:07 -0400
Subject: Re: Re-installing a TouchTone keypad in an ASR-33
From: ethan.dicks at gmail.com
---snip---
I couldn't say for certain, but even into the 1990s, the phone company
charged $1-$2USD/month for TouchTone service. Mostly by then, it was
just a surcharge applied to your bill for their convenience. When I
got a data line for UUCP around 1990 or so, I told them "no extras" -
no call-waiting, no three-way-calling, no speed-dial, and no
TouchTone. They tried to persuade me to get their profit-laden
features, but they really balked at setting me up a pulse-dial line.
I suggested that if it wasn't an option that could be canceled, then
perhaps they were exceeding the rates set by agreement with the Public
Utilities Commission. They acquiesced. I did have to patch the UUCP
dialer program (I was calling from an Amiga and didn't have the right
compiler environment to build from source) because you could _not_
pick pulse dial from L.sys because the app had "ATDT" hard-coded. A
quick change to ATDP and it was happy.
The last time I had a connection, I told them I didn't
want the touch-tone feature ( a few dollars a month ).
I don't pay for it but I've used a touch-tone phone on
my line several times. I suspect that like you, it was
too much trouble to remove so they just left it connected.
---snip---
If it's an ITT or other non-Western Electric phone, I'd wager it's
IC-based. AFAIK, only the W-E phones (i.e., pre-breakup) would have
the 1-transistor-2-coil keypad.
-ethan
Hi
I used to work for a company call SpeedCall. They made
touch tone decoders for taxi cabs and similar uses.
They all decoded with coil and capacitor. Only the coil had to
be exactly wound ( to the turn ). It had a slug to tune
it to work with the capacitor used with it.
Dwight
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