It's the best of the worse, because that's what they needed: a reliable way to generate a pulse sequence with different number of pulses for signaling.

For 60s technology (maybe even earlier) this was the best they could come up with for the desired price point.

With a little bit of practice, you could dial a phone number directly on the receiver hook. This also worked on touch-tone phones because the switches were all made backwards compatible with the old equipment.

I stumbled on this accidentally when I started to dial information (411) and meant to hang up with my finger before the last '1'. Instead, the switch hook "bounced" (making the click signifying the last '1') and I got connected anyway. (A bummer since every call to information was a charge on your bill.)

Still, once I figured that out my friends and I would try to call girls we liked using this method. The skill involved and the fact that you'd fail 2/3 of the time would distract you from the fear of actually talking to the girl once you got connected. "Oh, sh*t! It worked. Oh, hi, Rachel. I was playing around with the phone and must've accidentally dialed you."

Heh, reminds me if my university period. In the students house each apartment had a phone with the round dialing physically removed as the phones were supposed to be used only for recieving calls. I tried the technique you are referring to and it worked perfectly. Too bad that after some months the administration noticed the receipts from the phone company and me and the other guys living in the same apartment had to pay part of it.

Yes but you can't expect the average use to learn this. It's not user friendly at all.

It took a _lot_ of practice. I think I managed to successfully do it about 3 times ...

I've learned this from that movie hackers. #hacktheplanet

In my area (in the 80s/90s I think) we had to pay extra for touch tone service.

Anyone know if there was a technical reason for that originally?

A quick search shows that apparently these charges were still around until recently. Maybe it was just another reason for the telco to add a fee to the bill?

Originally, the switching equipment was driven with pulses, and your phone interacted with it directly.

As the dial plans got more elaborate, things like digit absorbers got in between you and the actual call routing equipment, but they all still talked to each other and to you with pulses.

When tone dialing made its debut, some offices had switched over to electronic control and could natively understand touch-tone, but a lot had not, so there were front-end circuits that would decode the tones and control the switching equipment. Throughout the 80s, pretty much all the step, panel, and crossbar switches were replaced with common-control switches (where a computer did the thinking, even if relays were still used for the actual routing), and the fees became bogus.

If you had Call Waiting, you should not have been paying extra for touch-tone.

All the fees were kind of B.S. especially as technology made providing the switching, call-forwarding and caller ID ring services easier and cheaper to provide.

Besides, remember that they used to charge _rent_ for your phone and wouldn't allow 3rd party phones at all until the late 60's or so.

It was invented in 1891: https://patents.google.com/patent/US486909

Keep in mind the link was referring to software UI's. It's not saying the mechanical rotary dial was bad, just software implementations imitating it...