Dial phone
jcelect
We were one of those neighbors without a phone! For me it was the rotatory dial phone on the wall that me and my wife paid for so my parents could talk to their grandchildren 500 miles away(1964)!The first thing I thought of was also the dial phone. For much of my childhood, our home phone had no dial. You picked it up and told the operator what number you wanted to call. We had a cumbersome telephone situation at our house. We were one of the few houses in our neighborhood that even had a phone, and some surrounding neighbors would come over to use our phone if necessary. It was a poor neighborhood, and not many could afford to have a phone. Also we would get calls for them, and it was my job to run nextdoor or across the street to get a neighbor or to pass on a message. When we first got a dial phone, around the early to mid-1950s, we all thought it was the magical hi-tech wonder of the ages. Of course, dial phones had been around for many years in many places, but just not in our small-town area.
And then there was my very first computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000, sometime in the early 1980s. Remember those? Very primitive, but I learned the basics on one.
jcelect