SKASS@drew.bitnet (No gas will be sold to anyone in a glass container.) (10/01/89)
Re: Phone Design I first made the switch from mechanical ringer to electronic warble about 5 years ago when I moved to Canada. The warble comes out of a cheap speaker, and it's impossible to tell what direction it's coming from. As a result, whenever a warble phone rang on the TV, I jumped from my chair. I never completely got over that. On the bright side, the Harmony (tm) and Signature (tm) phones I had from Northern Telecom were some of the best of the new generation phones I've seen. A `shoulderable' receiver, a nice handle for carrying the phone around while you talk, and up to date styling were all welcome. They were rugged too, though I almost did one in with a glass of vermouth into the keypad. A good rinsing of the insides fixed it. Those two models weren't for sale, or I'd have one here. I haven't found anything else that I thought looked as nice and worked as well. Fortunately I found an old 2500 recently, and don't miss the NT phones so much any more. And does anyone besides me have fond memories of the Panel Phone (tm) ? My parents still have the two we had installed about 20 years ago, and they work fine. They were installed into the wall, requiring a hole about 8 x 10 inches, and have a non-tangling cord about 4 feet long which retracts into a hole in the panel. They've never failed, despite the thousands of times my father said I was pulling too hard on the cord. They'll never go modular, I'm afraid, and if they do fail, we'll have to call the plasterer, but they made a lot of sense. We even have one of those two-line knobs on one of them, though it's not hooked up to both lines any more. An installer who came by the house a couple of years ago had never seen them before. Steve Kass * Department of Math and Comp Sci * Drew U * Madison NJ 07940 (201)-408-3614, (201)-514-1187, (201)-408-5923, skass@drew.bitnet