Remembering the Party Line

Being a 90's kid was almost like being a 70's kid. Both generations had loud-colored clothes and rocked shockingly bad haircuts, but besides being fashionably impaired they both knew how to have fun. When I say fun I mean real fun: the kind where you actually hang out with people face-to-face or actually hear someone's voice on the other end of technology. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Twitter and Facebook, but whatever happened to the "party line!" Now I know, many of you are gonna say party lines phased out towards the end of the 70's but not every area in the United States had abandoned party lines; there were still a lot of rural areas that continued to use party lines through much of the early 80's.

As a kid I remember how sometimes inconvenient party lines were. I mean you had this one single phone line that covered your entire neighborhood which only allowed one phone call to be made at a time. People could literally pick up their phones to make a call and couldn't because some guy was busy pillow talking his girlfriend on the other end. Either you waited for their conversation to be over or you politely asked them to get off the phone so you could make your call. Though inconvenient, the best thing about the party line was that it got everybody who wanted to talk on the phone at the same time regardless of how big the "party" was. It was the "Twitter" of an earlier generation but with live voices.

Rotary phone used pre 70's through mid-late 80's. Heavy as a brick!

Touch Tone / Push Button phone. Used late 80's through 90's. Still heavy as a brick!

There is just something about bringing people together at the same time that makes things more relevant to me. Twitter and Instagram are cool, but when you're plugged into technology all day waiting for feeds to drop sometimes it can hurt productivity. By the early part of the 90's major phone companies had taken over voice services for almost the entire country, removing the need to rely on party lines to communicate. It didn't necessarily mean the end of the party line concept; the new touch tone era was riddled with young hackers who used computers to host their own "phone parties" centered around whatever theme or subject they wanted, just like a radio show. People were able to dial dedicated numbers that connected them to a  phone party and just like an actual party the line's service began and ended at a certain time.

Of course now we just call that "good ole phone conferencing" and Ma Bell along with other mainstream and fringe companies now control those services. The joys of free enterprise among the youth back then was spectacular. If you had an idea and could make it happen then it caught on and you got credit for it. In the hands of big companies what was once good old-fashioned fun now cost a fortune which totally sucks! Nothing kills a fad more than a fat price tag.