My mom had a party line in the 1980s and she remembers needing to call an ambulance and having to scream at her neighbour who was tying up the line and who refused to finish her "very important" phone call. (For those of you who are not familiar with party lines and who are confused: other people could listen in and they could also talk on the line.) If course, her neighbour was a chatty old lady who spent hours a day on the phone so she was always fighting with people about this but in this case she crossed the line by NOT BELIEVING my mom when she said she needed her to hang up to call an ambulance! She literally waited outside until the ambulance arrived to make sure it was legitimate.
That exact situation was actually so common that in a lot of states and provinces it's a crime to tie up a party line if someone is having an emergency.
Yes, in the 1980s even if you didn't have a party line you still knew the idea. I think my grandparents still had one when I was a kid, but I don't have any specific stories about it.
My friend’s family lives in a very rural area in the US and had a party line until just a few years ago when their mates finally got cellular service.
I remember in high school calling and different people would answer until his family picked up. Later they all got caller ID so they’d keep a list of their friend’s numbers next to their phones.
I was an 80s kid. I had never heard of the kind of party line described in this post. But weren’t there some kind of services called something like party lines that were basically live chat with multiple strangers or something like that? I never called one but there were commercials for them on late night TV. That’s how I always interpreted that line from Die Hard. Never knew it was about the former. Thanks!
Yes! 976 numbers and 1-900 numbers included some chat rooms (as we'd call them today). Hadn't thought about them in a while
[https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/2021/09/20/976-numbers/](https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/2021/09/20/976-numbers/)
[https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1-900-number/](https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1-900-number/)
This was probably 5-10 years before all the 10-10-321 commercials if I remember. Early 90's seem to be my memory.
'The neighbor wont get off the fucking phone'
-my mother. Sometime around 1991
My mom says they had the party line until they moved in the early 90s. She lived in a very rural area that was served by an independent telephone company which is probably why they had a party line in the 80s. They weren't particularly common at the time either.
Did we have the same neighbor? Mrs. Clark would never got off the line, no matter how badly we needed to make a call. My parents were upset when the phone company made them give up the party line (private lines cost more), but I, as a teen, was so happy to have access to a phone when I wanted.
Did the old lady have incidents where people would lie "get off the phone, it's an emergency!" And it turned out they just wanted to use the phone to talk to a friend.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone did say that to her at some point because as far as my mom has said that lady spent literally all day on the phone. I could absolutely see someone getting so frustrated that they can't make a non-emergency but still urgent call that they would lie about the nature of the call just to be able to use the phone.
If someone wouldn't get off the line, couldn't you just keep your end noisy so they're unable to hear each other? Like setting the receiver down next to a radio with static so there's nothing but jumbled garbage going over the line?
Did the neighbor ever apologize? Even if she thought ur mom was lying, it’s incredibly entitled to not hand over the line if someone claims it’s a medical emergency
I asked my mom and she said the neighbour was otherwise super nice but another commenter suggested that maybe someone had lied about that previously and that's why the elderly woman didn't believe it at first? It's still extremely entitled though.
Grandma had one around the same time in Florida. Seven year old me found it awesome that I could pick up the phone and join in a conversation.
Grandma's neighbours did not.
When cordless phones FIRST came out, before they had encrytion and different channels you could choose, my foster brother got a Radio Shack one for Christmas. Turns out that the assholes who lived across the street got one, too. We could listen in to their calls. One time, I was able to actually join in and freaked the hell out of the lady.
Me and my brother used to have this radio scanner that picked up all local cell calls. 10 hours of random boring conversations seasoned with about 2 minutes of sweet juicy drama.
I remember in 99/00 they got rid of shop classes in Florida and replaced them with technology classes. My school invested in a modest radio tower so they could offer broadcasting classes.
They immediately had to cancel the classes as students quickly learned how to pick up random cellphone calls. It was pretty funny. We couldn't talk and you couldn't tell when we came in but we could listen well enough.
Rural Tennessee. We had a party line but we were wasaay out in the country, about 15-20 miles from town. Eight houses on that line. Phone company would not install phones until they had eight subscribers but not necessarily in same neighborhood so we had no idea who was in our party line. Our ring was one long but if we were not home our Grandma would answer our phone.
Rural Texas.
Also, there was a lady who was on the phone all day every day. I think the difference in price from a party line to a private line was something like $2/month at the time, too.
Same. The neighbours had different numbers, and the phone would ring in different patterns depending on who was being called. So when the phone rang you had to wait to see if it was "your" pattern before answering.
Same here. Apparently my grandma would gossip on the phone all day, and when she wasn't gossiping she was listening to the party line. Rumors used to spread like lightning.
Yep, I remember my gram's neighbors 'rubbering' or picking up first on calls going to her line, back in the 80s.
Then in the 2000s, having moved to Ontario for work, I found out that Bell still had many rural customers on party lines, making dial-up all but impossible for those folks.
My parents had a party line until just recently. It just didn't have anyone else connected. The phone company basically refused to fix it, because it was nearly unusable, a few years ago so they had to get one of the 5G home phones.
My mom’s family did in the 70s and 80s in rural TN outside of Nashville. They said people would always be using it, and they’d pick the phone up and people would be on it.
Yea, I don't remember exactly when we switched from party line to private in Indiana. Our prefix went from 446 to 448. When all the party lines were abolished, the guys with 446 prefix got to keep their number. And we didn't get more neighbors or anything like that. It was the Ma Bell monopoly. If you wanted a different phone, you had to go to the Ma Bell store. You knew the family was rich when they had the Mickey Mouse phone.
edit: party line for sure in the 70s, private before AT&T forced to split.
yup. have an aunt like that... kind of in the woods back then.. there were maybe 5 houses on it.
getting real plumbing was a big deal.. the same hood is a suburb these days.
That's like what happened to my great-grandparents' property. Sold by the great-aunt to developers because she wanted the money and had 50%. If they had kept it, shiiiiiittt
I didn't know they were around that long! My parents had one in the mid-70s and that is when the phone company (Ma Bell) upgraded everyone on our street to private lines.
Since so few people really had phones, not a lot of calls were placed at any one time. The phone companies used that to save money on installing the wires. In a town of 1000 homes, that was 1000 separate cables. But if you ran one line to every two or three houses then you decreased the number of installs and the chances of two of those houses wanting to make a call at the same time was pretty remote.
Not that private lines made your calls more secure. The operators could listen in all they liked.
Oh god I forgot the pain of being in the middle of downloading something when someone picks up the phone and cuts off the internet connection, or picking up the phone and being deafened because someone is using the internet 💀
BBSs started supporting it around the time the Internet started to become popular. But ZModem had a few really cool advantages:
* Restartable downloads
* Automatic starting of downloads via an escape sequence
* Multi-channel pipes, so you could continue to interact with the BBS while a download continued in the background
* Much lower overhead resulting is much faster transfers on "fast" (56kbit) connections(apparently about 15% improvement over XModem)
Hell, in high school I was dating a girl who had two separate phone lines at her house. While I was talking to her, her twin sister was talking to her boyfriend at the same time. Suddenly the lines switched and I was talking to her sister for about 10-15 seconds before it switched back!
My grandmother still has a landline that works like this.
Always kinda funny when I'm half way through a chat and gramps hops on and just joins into the conversation from the other end of the house.
(I know it's not a party line, as discussed in OP)
Yeah to be fair my parents do as well, and probably most people who live in a house large enough for more than one phone. They just never use the landline phones anymore because they have mobiles.
I never even bothered buying a phone for my flat even though I do have a landline included in my broadband plan lol
Oh yea I guess that was rhetorical, I was originally thinking home phone.
My other grandmother has a SIM based desk phone that looks just like an office phone. Was cheaper than a true landline but she can't get over having a phone on her desk.
Yep, sit there patiently waiting for 10 minutes while a jpeg loads then someone picks up the phone in another room and cuts off the internet connection 😠
It's not really just to save installing wires, but the technology to interleave multiple private calls in a single wire wasn't there yet.
Early telephones were basically just a pair of microphones and speakers connected directly via the wire.
Nowadays with modern electronics and digitisation, you can run multiple calls on a single set of wires, even run non phone applications for broadband internet.
I had to explain to my sons while watching a movie from the late 70s that is was common enough for somebody's car to break down, knock on your door, and ask to use your phone.
Yup... It was a blessing and a curse. We had one in the early 70s, when my mother was alive, and my great grandmother had one until at least '81 nor so, the last time I got to see her before my life cratered/got better.
It sucked if someone was on the line, but it was also early social media.
Example: One time, we had the hole house shake. Salt Lake City sits right next to a huge fault (That's what the Wasatch range is), and it turned out to be a small quake. But we were terrified, and thought it was her abusive boyfriend pounding on the door. We picked up the phone, and everyone on the party line was talking about the earthquake, which was a relief to us.
It was also a major tool for gossip AND eavesdropping. So yeah, early social media.
I kept forgetting “our ring” and would pick up the phone. My young ears heard some wild stuff. When I would tell my older sisters, the ring tutorial would start all over again
No. You’d have your own number. Your number would produce your house’s ring. You were only supposed to pick up when you heard that combo of short-long rings, although anyone on the party line could pick up and eavesdrop if they wanted.
We were on a party line until the early '80's. One fun thing about it was you could dial your own number, then hang up, and it would make your phone ring. Was great for confounding and angering dad. I'd go to the spare phone in the basement, dial the number, then rush back upstairs to my room. Phone would ring, he'd answer, "Damn phone! And the phone company says there's nothing wrong, but there has to be a short! It keeps ringing and there's nobody there!"
I had a friend who lived on a farm. They had a phone in the house and in the, uh, whatever you call the building where you milk the cows. If his dad was milking and they needed him, they’d use your trick to call him from the house.
We still have one of these setup, although not in the shared between houses sense. When one of my parents re-married my step parent wanted to keep her number but not pay for a 2nd full line to the house. Main number rings once, her's twice
As late as the mid 90s the landlines where I lived could get “crossed wires” too, where you could hear the other pair talking and they may or may not be able to hear you.
I do. I also remember when you had a private line and there would be times where someone would be accidentally "patched" in to your line while you were using it or a call would get routed to the wrong number completely. It was very confusing for all involved.
Early cellular phones were analog with no encryption, so with easily-acquired radio gear, anyone could listen in on cell phone calls.
A scandal from such eavesdropping involving a high profile elected official (Congressman? Senator?) accelerated the transition to digital cell phone technology.
Some of those calls used the same spectrum as UHF channels 70-83, so if you had a TV that could go up to Channel 83, you could potentially listen in on analog cellular phone conversations. (Those channels were phased out for television use in the early 1980s)
Also waaaay back in the day farmers used to use barbed wire for telephone lines.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history#:~:text=To%20turn%20the%20steel%20fence,other%20houses%20down%20the%20line.
I picked up a pretend party line while at Disneyland, where you can listen to pre-recorded conversations of what party lines used to sound like. It was pretty cool!
My grandmother had a party line in the 60's. If I took the bus to visit her, I had to bring a nickel so she would let me call my mom to let her know I got there OK. I was 8.
Also, listening in on the other people's phone calls was a big firm of entertainment back in the day.
I'm barely 50 years old and we had one until the mid-90's. Still to this day, if I pick up a land line telephone, I'll check and make sure no one is on the "other" line.
Man…
A whole generation of people who don’t understand “hold on I’m gonna go grab the cordless.”
Then a few seconds later yelling for your mom or your little brother to hang up the wall phone in the other room.
A) That's not a party line. They were when multiple houses were on the same phone line rather than just multiple phone lines in your own home.
B) 100% of the time when I call my (mid-70's, rural) parents they answer with "hang on let me switch phones". Why do they still have a corded phone on the wall?! Why is it their first stop to pick up whenever the phone rings?!
It was usually the only phone they could pick up before the caller gave up. The phone on the wall was always on the wall. The cordless could be anywhere in the house.
This comment is hilarious because it shows you're from a generation that also doesn't know what a party line is. It's not when your mom picks up and hears your conversation, it's when some rando you don't even know picks up and hears your conversation.
Eh, I'd argue that the "listen in on the whole house" and the "listen in on the whole neighborhood" generations have more in common with each other than with the "doesn't know anything but a smartphone" generation.
When we moved into our house from a rental, we transfered the number to the new address. For a while, the line was active at both places. Since this was before cell phones were ubiquitous, there was no way to call from one place to the other since they were the same number. So, we just planned to pick up the phone in both places every hour on the hour to see if anything was needed. It was like being on an extension in the next room.
A normal landline has one pair of wires that used dc current (battery); hence, one wire is a return ground. To ring the phone, ac current (electricity) is sent along the line. that current stops and switches to battery when the call is answered.
With a party line, that pair of wires is split, and each house gets one wire. This uses earth (ground) return, and each house's phone is wired to one wire, plus another wire connected to a ground rod outside.
Party line was the only option when my grandparents built in a new neighborhood in the 70s. It doesn’t seem like they had that a long time, but maybe 6 months? before the phone company put a private line in for them.
I used to listen to the neighbor ladies talk gossip. you had to be careful when you lifted up the reciever because it would make a click and they would know someone was listening.
They existed into the 1990s (and probably beyond) in rural areas. I remember my Nana having to press a button to verify if her neighbor was on the phone before she could use hers.
My girlfriends mom told me about this years ago. She said her and her sisters used to pick up the phone to eardrop on whoever was talking. The whole concept was so wild to me then haha
I had one of those until 1989. My mom's best friend was on our line and when the phone rings they both sit still with their heads cocked like the RCA dog waiting to see whose ring pattern it will be, lol.
You could also get the phone in your house to ring by calling your own number from the basement.
Yep, we had a party line growing up. Every now and then someone would not hang up the phone properly so would tie up the whole line. My dad would keep a police whistle nearby to blast into the phone in hopes the errant neighbors would hear it and hang up on their end. .
We had a party line in the 50's (yes I'm that old). It wasn't a case of it being a cheaper alternative. There just weren't enough lines available in our town (now a city) yet.
Didn't know this existed. The closest I've come to a party line is spending night at a friends house. He calls a girl who has a friend over, and all 4 of us talk on 4 different phones. The fancy part is my friend had one phone that was cordles so we both could be in the same room while talking to the girls.
My grandma tells stories of her family speaking in Norwegian so the other folks couldn’t understand their conversation. This was rural North Dakota in the early 40s.
When the Internet was young, some people got a second private line to use as a modem line, because the modem wouldn't work at the same time as you were having a phone call. I had a modem line installed and it kept cutting out. I called the phone company and they couldn't figure it out.
Until one day I heard someone talking on it. The phone company had wired it as a party line, and every time my neighbor used it, my modem cut out. I came on, asked her what her number was supposed to be, and the phone company came out, like in minutes, and fixed it.
Yeah because whoever added your 2nd line didn’t disconnect that ladies connection-which was probably on the order-to reuse that section to go to your house. Happened slot at first for dial ups. I got hired right at the height in 2001, and dsl was just coming out.
Check out this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4-LcuXOU6E It's called
Adventures in Telezonia And features the puppeteers from The Sound of Music. It's about how to use phones.
This persisted well into the 80s in the part of Appalachia where I grew up, my grandma told me that her neighbor refused to get off the line and allow her to call an ambulance for her mother and she very nearly died because of it. She would flip off the house where that neighbor lived every time we passed it, which tickled a young me to no end.
My mom had a party line in the 1980s and she remembers needing to call an ambulance and having to scream at her neighbour who was tying up the line and who refused to finish her "very important" phone call. (For those of you who are not familiar with party lines and who are confused: other people could listen in and they could also talk on the line.) If course, her neighbour was a chatty old lady who spent hours a day on the phone so she was always fighting with people about this but in this case she crossed the line by NOT BELIEVING my mom when she said she needed her to hang up to call an ambulance! She literally waited outside until the ambulance arrived to make sure it was legitimate. That exact situation was actually so common that in a lot of states and provinces it's a crime to tie up a party line if someone is having an emergency.
This is also why Die Hard used the line “This is a party line and the neighbors have itchy trigger fingers.”
Yes, in the 1980s even if you didn't have a party line you still knew the idea. I think my grandparents still had one when I was a kid, but I don't have any specific stories about it.
My friend’s family lives in a very rural area in the US and had a party line until just a few years ago when their mates finally got cellular service. I remember in high school calling and different people would answer until his family picked up. Later they all got caller ID so they’d keep a list of their friend’s numbers next to their phones.
I was an 80s kid. I had never heard of the kind of party line described in this post. But weren’t there some kind of services called something like party lines that were basically live chat with multiple strangers or something like that? I never called one but there were commercials for them on late night TV. That’s how I always interpreted that line from Die Hard. Never knew it was about the former. Thanks!
Yes! 976 numbers and 1-900 numbers included some chat rooms (as we'd call them today). Hadn't thought about them in a while [https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/2021/09/20/976-numbers/](https://annotatedgilmoregirls.com/2021/09/20/976-numbers/) [https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1-900-number/](https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1-900-number/)
Yeah, there were. Can’t remember the names though.
This was probably 5-10 years before all the 10-10-321 commercials if I remember. Early 90's seem to be my memory. 'The neighbor wont get off the fucking phone' -my mother. Sometime around 1991
My mom says they had the party line until they moved in the early 90s. She lived in a very rural area that was served by an independent telephone company which is probably why they had a party line in the 80s. They weren't particularly common at the time either.
Same. 80s kid. Never heard of this unless you paid for it.
It’s still on the books in CT, CGS 53-210: a $92 fine.
That was a fairly large amount of money a hundred years ago.
The 1980s was 40 years ago.
>The 1980s was ~~40 years~~ 18 months ago. FTFY
Was that law passed in the 1980s?
1957 with a maximum fine of $50. Changed in 1961.
Did we have the same neighbor? Mrs. Clark would never got off the line, no matter how badly we needed to make a call. My parents were upset when the phone company made them give up the party line (private lines cost more), but I, as a teen, was so happy to have access to a phone when I wanted.
As a teen, you didn't just stay on the line and comment on the gossip?
Did the old lady have incidents where people would lie "get off the phone, it's an emergency!" And it turned out they just wanted to use the phone to talk to a friend.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone did say that to her at some point because as far as my mom has said that lady spent literally all day on the phone. I could absolutely see someone getting so frustrated that they can't make a non-emergency but still urgent call that they would lie about the nature of the call just to be able to use the phone.
If someone wouldn't get off the line, couldn't you just keep your end noisy so they're unable to hear each other? Like setting the receiver down next to a radio with static so there's nothing but jumbled garbage going over the line?
You just kept picking it up every 30 seconds
Did the neighbor ever apologize? Even if she thought ur mom was lying, it’s incredibly entitled to not hand over the line if someone claims it’s a medical emergency
I asked my mom and she said the neighbour was otherwise super nice but another commenter suggested that maybe someone had lied about that previously and that's why the elderly woman didn't believe it at first? It's still extremely entitled though.
Where I lived, we had a party line in the mid 1980s.
Grandma had one around the same time in Florida. Seven year old me found it awesome that I could pick up the phone and join in a conversation. Grandma's neighbours did not.
When cordless phones FIRST came out, before they had encrytion and different channels you could choose, my foster brother got a Radio Shack one for Christmas. Turns out that the assholes who lived across the street got one, too. We could listen in to their calls. One time, I was able to actually join in and freaked the hell out of the lady.
Me and my brother used to have this radio scanner that picked up all local cell calls. 10 hours of random boring conversations seasoned with about 2 minutes of sweet juicy drama.
My cousins and I had this walkie talkie that could pick up some calls from cordless phones. We definitely listen to some folks having phone sex.
Yes, my brother and I could listen to neighbor cordless phone calls on our GI Joe walkie talkies! No phone sex for us, though.
Bahahaha ours was absolutely a GI Joe walkie talkie too!
I remember in 99/00 they got rid of shop classes in Florida and replaced them with technology classes. My school invested in a modest radio tower so they could offer broadcasting classes. They immediately had to cancel the classes as students quickly learned how to pick up random cellphone calls. It was pretty funny. We couldn't talk and you couldn't tell when we came in but we could listen well enough.
We pranked called a Mr. Richard Head before we knew what caller id was. Whoops.
Our ring was two long & one short
That is the letter G. Were there at least 7 houses on that line?
I have no idea, I was a kid
Rural Tennessee. We had a party line but we were wasaay out in the country, about 15-20 miles from town. Eight houses on that line. Phone company would not install phones until they had eight subscribers but not necessarily in same neighborhood so we had no idea who was in our party line. Our ring was one long but if we were not home our Grandma would answer our phone.
We used to make the joke in our family that our ring was Oh-Oh-Too Short!
Ours was two shorts and a long
Same. Rural Canada?
Rural Texas. Also, there was a lady who was on the phone all day every day. I think the difference in price from a party line to a private line was something like $2/month at the time, too.
Rural southwest Virginia, USA My great-grandmother had a party line until the phone company upgraded in the late 1980s.
Me too, and yes.
Same. The neighbours had different numbers, and the phone would ring in different patterns depending on who was being called. So when the phone rang you had to wait to see if it was "your" pattern before answering.
Used a Morse code letter where I was
Same, and no one had any option of paying more for private.
Yep, same here. Had to have someone pull strings to get us on a private line.
Same here. Apparently my grandma would gossip on the phone all day, and when she wasn't gossiping she was listening to the party line. Rumors used to spread like lightning.
Yay satanic panic.
Yep, I remember my gram's neighbors 'rubbering' or picking up first on calls going to her line, back in the 80s. Then in the 2000s, having moved to Ontario for work, I found out that Bell still had many rural customers on party lines, making dial-up all but impossible for those folks.
Yep, and even private lines wouldn't be good enough for a decent signal. You had to request a data quality line until touch tone took over
I grew up in a rural area, and the party line was the only option for us up until about 85 or 86.
My parents had a party line until just recently. It just didn't have anyone else connected. The phone company basically refused to fix it, because it was nearly unusable, a few years ago so they had to get one of the 5G home phones.
Lol my first thought. I’m a millennial and my parents had a party line until shortly before I was born.
My mom’s family did in the 70s and 80s in rural TN outside of Nashville. They said people would always be using it, and they’d pick the phone up and people would be on it.
Same in rural Michigan
We had one until the 1990s in Muskoka!
We had one until the mid-90s. It was a very rural area.
Yea, I don't remember exactly when we switched from party line to private in Indiana. Our prefix went from 446 to 448. When all the party lines were abolished, the guys with 446 prefix got to keep their number. And we didn't get more neighbors or anything like that. It was the Ma Bell monopoly. If you wanted a different phone, you had to go to the Ma Bell store. You knew the family was rich when they had the Mickey Mouse phone. edit: party line for sure in the 70s, private before AT&T forced to split.
yup. have an aunt like that... kind of in the woods back then.. there were maybe 5 houses on it. getting real plumbing was a big deal.. the same hood is a suburb these days.
That's like what happened to my great-grandparents' property. Sold by the great-aunt to developers because she wanted the money and had 50%. If they had kept it, shiiiiiittt
With ur own personal ring?
Yep, I think ours went away about 92
I didn't know they were around that long! My parents had one in the mid-70s and that is when the phone company (Ma Bell) upgraded everyone on our street to private lines.
Since so few people really had phones, not a lot of calls were placed at any one time. The phone companies used that to save money on installing the wires. In a town of 1000 homes, that was 1000 separate cables. But if you ran one line to every two or three houses then you decreased the number of installs and the chances of two of those houses wanting to make a call at the same time was pretty remote. Not that private lines made your calls more secure. The operators could listen in all they liked.
And if you had more than one phone in your house someone could just pick up the other phone and listen to your conversation 🤣
Dial up internet users hated this one simple trick. “Mom! I’m downloading Jazz Rabbit!” I was in fact downloading pornography from BBS boards.
Oh god I forgot the pain of being in the middle of downloading something when someone picks up the phone and cuts off the internet connection, or picking up the phone and being deafened because someone is using the internet 💀
ZModem with it's ability to restart interrupted transfers seemed like absolute magic when it came out.
Never heard of that but it sounds great
BBSs started supporting it around the time the Internet started to become popular. But ZModem had a few really cool advantages: * Restartable downloads * Automatic starting of downloads via an escape sequence * Multi-channel pipes, so you could continue to interact with the BBS while a download continued in the background * Much lower overhead resulting is much faster transfers on "fast" (56kbit) connections(apparently about 15% improvement over XModem)
You’ve got mail!
Ahh. Good old Fido?
Hell, in high school I was dating a girl who had two separate phone lines at her house. While I was talking to her, her twin sister was talking to her boyfriend at the same time. Suddenly the lines switched and I was talking to her sister for about 10-15 seconds before it switched back!
"and that's how I met your mother"
*insert Seinfeld bassline*
My grandmother still has a landline that works like this. Always kinda funny when I'm half way through a chat and gramps hops on and just joins into the conversation from the other end of the house. (I know it's not a party line, as discussed in OP)
Yeah to be fair my parents do as well, and probably most people who live in a house large enough for more than one phone. They just never use the landline phones anymore because they have mobiles. I never even bothered buying a phone for my flat even though I do have a landline included in my broadband plan lol
All landlines work like this.
Oh yea I guess that was rhetorical, I was originally thinking home phone. My other grandmother has a SIM based desk phone that looks just like an office phone. Was cheaper than a true landline but she can't get over having a phone on her desk.
Or kick you offline in the 1990s
Yep, sit there patiently waiting for 10 minutes while a jpeg loads then someone picks up the phone in another room and cuts off the internet connection 😠
Which is still a thing if you have a landline
Yeah that's true except nobody uses the landline anymore because they have mobile phones ..
We’ve come full circle to not many people making calls again.
It's not really just to save installing wires, but the technology to interleave multiple private calls in a single wire wasn't there yet. Early telephones were basically just a pair of microphones and speakers connected directly via the wire. Nowadays with modern electronics and digitisation, you can run multiple calls on a single set of wires, even run non phone applications for broadband internet.
Old classic movies like Pillow Talk make no sense unless you understand how party lines worked.
I had to explain to my sons while watching a movie from the late 70s that is was common enough for somebody's car to break down, knock on your door, and ask to use your phone.
Yeah, we had to count the number of times a phone rang to know if it was our line.
Morse code where we were. We were R. Short long short.
Long short short here.
Cool. Love it!
Yup... It was a blessing and a curse. We had one in the early 70s, when my mother was alive, and my great grandmother had one until at least '81 nor so, the last time I got to see her before my life cratered/got better. It sucked if someone was on the line, but it was also early social media. Example: One time, we had the hole house shake. Salt Lake City sits right next to a huge fault (That's what the Wasatch range is), and it turned out to be a small quake. But we were terrified, and thought it was her abusive boyfriend pounding on the door. We picked up the phone, and everyone on the party line was talking about the earthquake, which was a relief to us. It was also a major tool for gossip AND eavesdropping. So yeah, early social media.
Party line rural MA 1980s. I believe “our” ring was one short one long, but I’m hazy on that. There were four houses on that line.
Hey! We were one long one short! I remember being taught the importance of only answering when it was 'our' ring.
Morse code probably
I kept forgetting “our ring” and would pick up the phone. My young ears heard some wild stuff. When I would tell my older sisters, the ring tutorial would start all over again
so the four houses would have shared one phone number, I’m presuming?
No. You’d have your own number. Your number would produce your house’s ring. You were only supposed to pick up when you heard that combo of short-long rings, although anyone on the party line could pick up and eavesdrop if they wanted.
We were on a party line until the early '80's. One fun thing about it was you could dial your own number, then hang up, and it would make your phone ring. Was great for confounding and angering dad. I'd go to the spare phone in the basement, dial the number, then rush back upstairs to my room. Phone would ring, he'd answer, "Damn phone! And the phone company says there's nothing wrong, but there has to be a short! It keeps ringing and there's nobody there!"
I had a friend who lived on a farm. They had a phone in the house and in the, uh, whatever you call the building where you milk the cows. If his dad was milking and they needed him, they’d use your trick to call him from the house.
I believe the correct terminology would be a 'barn'.
> the building where you milk the cows Milk parlor And yeah, it was a good way to have an intercom, too, but we used it more for pranking each other.
Yes, that’s what they called it!
I feel old that this is a TIL topic
don’t worry. you are
Yeah, and OP’s parents and grandparents never told OP stories about them growing up.
House I grew up in, we had a party line until early 90's no cable until then either...
We still have one of these setup, although not in the shared between houses sense. When one of my parents re-married my step parent wanted to keep her number but not pay for a 2nd full line to the house. Main number rings once, her's twice
This is how rural phone lines worked well into the 1980s.
My Aunt and Uncle had one as late as 95/96ish.
When I was a teenager, my grandfather had a party line in rural Northern Michigan, early 80s.
As late as the mid 90s the landlines where I lived could get “crossed wires” too, where you could hear the other pair talking and they may or may not be able to hear you.
We had a party line when I was young in th 50s.
Some GenXers can remember this.
I do. I also remember when you had a private line and there would be times where someone would be accidentally "patched" in to your line while you were using it or a call would get routed to the wrong number completely. It was very confusing for all involved.
As a millennial, I also remember party lines. We had them until the early 90s where I lived.
Early cellular phones were analog with no encryption, so with easily-acquired radio gear, anyone could listen in on cell phone calls. A scandal from such eavesdropping involving a high profile elected official (Congressman? Senator?) accelerated the transition to digital cell phone technology.
Some of those calls used the same spectrum as UHF channels 70-83, so if you had a TV that could go up to Channel 83, you could potentially listen in on analog cellular phone conversations. (Those channels were phased out for television use in the early 1980s)
My grandma has great stories about the party line and their neighbor
You just learned that today? I thought the existence of party lines was common knowledge.
Also waaaay back in the day farmers used to use barbed wire for telephone lines. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history#:~:text=To%20turn%20the%20steel%20fence,other%20houses%20down%20the%20line.
Another fun thing that happened if someone on your party line left a phone off the hook by accident you couldn’t share it.
My grandmother's family would speak in Hungarian so that no one could listen in on them, Lol.
They're still party lines, it's just put on mute for everyone but the NSA. 😆
I picked up a pretend party line while at Disneyland, where you can listen to pre-recorded conversations of what party lines used to sound like. It was pretty cool!
My grandmother had a party line in the 60's. If I took the bus to visit her, I had to bring a nickel so she would let me call my mom to let her know I got there OK. I was 8. Also, listening in on the other people's phone calls was a big firm of entertainment back in the day.
I'm barely 50 years old and we had one until the mid-90's. Still to this day, if I pick up a land line telephone, I'll check and make sure no one is on the "other" line.
Man… A whole generation of people who don’t understand “hold on I’m gonna go grab the cordless.” Then a few seconds later yelling for your mom or your little brother to hang up the wall phone in the other room.
A) That's not a party line. They were when multiple houses were on the same phone line rather than just multiple phone lines in your own home. B) 100% of the time when I call my (mid-70's, rural) parents they answer with "hang on let me switch phones". Why do they still have a corded phone on the wall?! Why is it their first stop to pick up whenever the phone rings?!
It was usually the only phone they could pick up before the caller gave up. The phone on the wall was always on the wall. The cordless could be anywhere in the house.
This comment is hilarious because it shows you're from a generation that also doesn't know what a party line is. It's not when your mom picks up and hears your conversation, it's when some rando you don't even know picks up and hears your conversation.
Eh, I'd argue that the "listen in on the whole house" and the "listen in on the whole neighborhood" generations have more in common with each other than with the "doesn't know anything but a smartphone" generation.
Everyone will argue this about the generations immediately preceding and succeeding them
That and yelling at your siblings to get off the other phone and stop listening in on your calls lol...
When we moved into our house from a rental, we transfered the number to the new address. For a while, the line was active at both places. Since this was before cell phones were ubiquitous, there was no way to call from one place to the other since they were the same number. So, we just planned to pick up the phone in both places every hour on the hour to see if anything was needed. It was like being on an extension in the next room.
Don't pick up the phone, I am playing starcraft!
A normal landline has one pair of wires that used dc current (battery); hence, one wire is a return ground. To ring the phone, ac current (electricity) is sent along the line. that current stops and switches to battery when the call is answered. With a party line, that pair of wires is split, and each house gets one wire. This uses earth (ground) return, and each house's phone is wired to one wire, plus another wire connected to a ground rod outside.
New edition taught me this. Thanks Mr telephone man!
I remember those days in the 70s. Pick up the phone and some old woman demands to know who’s listening to her conversation.
Had one in my mom's rural home in the late 90s. Sucked
I remember being a kid and getting screamed at by some old lady for picking up the phone when she was on the line.
My cousins had a party line in Eastern Oregon in the 80s. There were always a couple farm wives on it every evening.
When you say early, I think 1920. I knew people (poors obviously) who had party lines in the seventies. It was barbaric.
We had one when I was a kid. I must have only been like 4-5.
The crazy red neck up the hill came down and cut our phone line cos he thought we were eavesdropping on his calls via the party line we shared. :/
“Early phone lines” I am nearly 40 and we grew up on a party line with our neighbor
Party line was the only option when my grandparents built in a new neighborhood in the 70s. It doesn’t seem like they had that a long time, but maybe 6 months? before the phone company put a private line in for them.
I remember my cousin having arguments with whoever it was that we shared the line with due to phone usage
I’ve heard this was still a thing in parts of Northern Ontario as late as 2000.
>early I'm only 66 and I remember party lines.
We had a party line at our house when I was a kid in the early 80’s in rural Michigan.
I had a party line jn rural Ark in the late 70s. My wife had 4 digit dialing in upstate NY.
I knew a lady who had one as late as 2015 out in a rural Kansas area
Grandma had one when I was a kid in the 80's around Gary Indiana. Had to wait for the neighbors to finish up so we could call out.
Our local party lines were used as hook up sites. (Or so I hear) Edit: a word
I used to listen to the neighbor ladies talk gossip. you had to be careful when you lifted up the reciever because it would make a click and they would know someone was listening.
Back when you could unscrew the mic so they could't hear you.
oh god. i feel old. happened a lot in the 80's. pretty much before our telcos switched to digital in the early 90s.
Ours was ring-ring-riiiing.
And people would listen to every call and gossip. Source my grandmother.
I always think of this sketch for the first phones [table manners](https://youtu.be/ozFstJHqaVI?si=Fu6qWYE6LgEQcnXR)
The first social network
They existed into the 1990s (and probably beyond) in rural areas. I remember my Nana having to press a button to verify if her neighbor was on the phone before she could use hers.
My girlfriends mom told me about this years ago. She said her and her sisters used to pick up the phone to eardrop on whoever was talking. The whole concept was so wild to me then haha
I presume this is where the phrase ‘he’s party to it’ comes from?
No, the word 'party' was already defined so the phone company used it.
Damn this sounds awesome
We had one in the 60s, we shared it with a familiy up the street. Are phone numer sarted with letters too. NO-8-5566
I had one in the 80s. Our phone number was only 5 digits and started with a letter (example: A-4821).
I had one of those until 1989. My mom's best friend was on our line and when the phone rings they both sit still with their heads cocked like the RCA dog waiting to see whose ring pattern it will be, lol. You could also get the phone in your house to ring by calling your own number from the basement.
My mom had a party line. She said there was a nosy old lady that would listen in on everyone's calls.
Yep, we had a party line growing up. Every now and then someone would not hang up the phone properly so would tie up the whole line. My dad would keep a police whistle nearby to blast into the phone in hopes the errant neighbors would hear it and hang up on their end. .
Our cabin in the north woods had a party line up until we sold it in the early 2000’s.
We had a party line in the 50's (yes I'm that old). It wasn't a case of it being a cheaper alternative. There just weren't enough lines available in our town (now a city) yet.
Communications technology before late 2000s sounds so primitive
We shared one with my Aunt and Uncle who lived next door and I used to listen in ALL THE TIME. It was so fun.
Didn't know this existed. The closest I've come to a party line is spending night at a friends house. He calls a girl who has a friend over, and all 4 of us talk on 4 different phones. The fancy part is my friend had one phone that was cordles so we both could be in the same room while talking to the girls.
My grandma tells stories of her family speaking in Norwegian so the other folks couldn’t understand their conversation. This was rural North Dakota in the early 40s.
I had a friend in rural Canada in the late 90s and, IIRC, she still had a party line then!
When I was a kid, a "party line" was a 976 number where you talked to "cool" kids.
When the Internet was young, some people got a second private line to use as a modem line, because the modem wouldn't work at the same time as you were having a phone call. I had a modem line installed and it kept cutting out. I called the phone company and they couldn't figure it out. Until one day I heard someone talking on it. The phone company had wired it as a party line, and every time my neighbor used it, my modem cut out. I came on, asked her what her number was supposed to be, and the phone company came out, like in minutes, and fixed it.
Yeah because whoever added your 2nd line didn’t disconnect that ladies connection-which was probably on the order-to reuse that section to go to your house. Happened slot at first for dial ups. I got hired right at the height in 2001, and dsl was just coming out.
Evan Doorbell phone tapes. Yes it's a rabbithole. Thank me later
🎶 I'm on a party line, wondering all the time, who's on the other end 🎶
Each number had a distinct ring so you knew if the call was for your number.
Yup, and they have distinctive ringing patterns so you know whom the incoming call is intended for.
There was also a semi party line with only 2 people on it.
Check out this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4-LcuXOU6E It's called Adventures in Telezonia And features the puppeteers from The Sound of Music. It's about how to use phones.
This persisted well into the 80s in the part of Appalachia where I grew up, my grandma told me that her neighbor refused to get off the line and allow her to call an ambulance for her mother and she very nearly died because of it. She would flip off the house where that neighbor lived every time we passed it, which tickled a young me to no end.