Hoosier Memories: Party Lines

Growing up in Indiana, my family lived about 45 miles SW of Indianapolis way out in the country during the 1960's & 70's. 
We had a black land-line phone like the one pictured.

It was a party-line, meaning about a half dozen neighbors shared the same phone line. You could pick up the receiver and hear someone chatting away and, if you did, you just hung up to wait till the line was clear to make your own call. That may have been between 1963 & 1966, because sometime after everyone started having their own private lines.

Believe it or not, most everyone had just one phone until the late 60's when it became trendy to have more then one phone, which meant you to have the phone company put in a land-line connection in every room you wanted an additional phone in. Teens started being able to have their own phone in their rooms, if family's could afford it, so they could talk to friends.

That lasted thru the 70's.

Imagine, back then, if you made an appointment or arranged to meet people someplace, people actually just expected you to show up. No reminders. No way to check to see why your were late or if you forgot, unless the found a pay phone to do so.

Then sometime in the 80's "cordless" phones started trending and in the early to mid 90's, "answering machines," with mini cassettes inside you left a message on for callers to hear became the next big thing.
(You see those on some older TV series programs.)
With land-lines you paid for a service plan that could he either limited to just local calls or could include a long distance plan with unlimited free minutes that wouldn't start until 9pm. So everyone would wait to 9pm to make long distance calls. If you called during the day, you paid full price for those long distance minutes.
Usually you had a local service carrier and a separate long distance provider.

As we neared 2000's, cell phones started coming on the scene, But the plans were priced per call & text and, while convenient, were kind of expensive to use, but it was a privilege only available to people in towns & cities. Cell towers weren't prevalent yet and people in the country still just had land-lines. 

Eventually, the cellphones and their service plans improved moving from contract plans to no contract plans we have to day.  I remember when T-Mobile was regarded as a weak contender in the cell phone business, but worked their way to the top in the business. 

I've read that land-line phones are presently making a come-back, though they are connected via a service that uses your Wifi.
 In the case of a electro-magnetic event that could wipe out all electronic services, you'd lose all electronic connections and it lacks the advantage of a hard phone line in-the-ground service of the past.

In the old phone days, if someone called you my mistake, they said, "Sorry, wrong number."
Nowadays, when you accidently get a cell call, you get a text that says, "Sorry. Butt call."
The world has certainly changed.