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Posted By: Texas_Ranger Old Austrian phones - 05/18/04 12:47 PM
I finally took pictures of some of my old phones.

[Linked Image from stud4.tuwien.ac.at]

The W48 was the first post-WWII phone and supposedly manufactured from 1948 to the mid 1970ies. It was available in black and beige, some companies had custom colors made though. I've seen a green one for an underware store chain and I think there were a few red ones too. And I've got a caramel beige one (the standard beige was rather yellowish, called chamois). For a chamois one you had to pay up. The very first ones had a cloth cord, mine only has the woven handset cord, maybe the phone cord was replaced at some point. Some also had a round brown cloth handset cord. From about the mid 1950ies on there were only round plastic handset cords. The older ones originally had Zylmurbafi dials, but I guess those got replaced later. My dial is definitely "stolen" from a W80. The case was solid heavy bakelite and indestructible unless you smashed it on the floor.

[Linked Image from stud4.tuwien.ac.at]
Here's an inside shot. Pretty straightforward, about the only thing that could fail is the capacitor beneath the terminal block. Or the wires could break. Even today students of technical schools learn how to fix those phones.
Weird thing: the bells of those phones all sound slightly different. I've got 5 of them, and _none_ sound exactly the same.

[Linked Image from stud4.tuwien.ac.at]

The newer W74 model. Available in chamois and grey, inofficially also black. Produced from around 1973 to the late 80ies after it had long been replaced by the more modern W80.

[Linked Image from stud4.tuwien.ac.at]

Inside it's alreadfy got some more electronics, but not too much.

[Linked Image from stud4.tuwien.ac.at]
The party line relay box. To give you an idea of it's size I put a standard CD next to it.

[Linked Image from stud4.tuwien.ac.at]

Lots of stuff...

{Edited to get some images to display properly - Paul}


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 05-18-2004).]
Posted By: pauluk Re: Old Austrian phones - 05/18/04 08:37 PM
I don't know if you can grasp what I'm getting at, but to someone who grew up in Britain, the styling of these phones just looks European. They conjour up images of similar-looking phones from old movies, set in far-off Continental places. They just couldn't be British or American, if you see what I mean.....

It's interesting that your W48 has components fitted on both the base and cover, interconnected, just like the old GPO 300-series phones here.

But whereas your W74 seems to have gone for fitted everything in the top half (and presumably the base is just a cover plate?) the later 700-series phones here fitted evrything onto the base and the top half was purely a cover, like the Bell 500 sets in the U.S.
Posted By: Texas_Ranger Re: Old Austrian phones - 05/18/04 08:43 PM
Yes, the base of the W74 is just a metal cover plate with 4 rubber feet. The W80 (and all other 80 models, i.e. TAP80 and TAP80K) had everything fitted into the base and the top was just a cover. After the 80 series we got the 90 and 95 which were just flat pieces of grey plastic with green *shudder* keypad. Flimsy construction, designed to work a few years max. The W48 were designed to last forever, and even though the conversion to digital switching has taken out a lot of these (they often made people believe they couldn't use rotary phones any more and just replaced them) surprisingly many are still around and in use.
Posted By: pauluk Re: Old Austrian phones - 05/18/04 08:57 PM
I know what you mean. The old 300/700s here and 500s in America were designed to give decades of service, and to be easily repaired or serviced when needed.

Sadly, it's hard to find someone these days who still uses one of these nice old phones (except for people like us, of course! [Linked Image]). Most people are too obsessed with having 50-number memories and all the other features of a mdoern phone.

I think they've also gotten to the point where the idea of actually rotary-dialing a number instead of tone-dialing on a keypad seems somehow quaint and old-fashioned. Of course, having to dial up to 11 digits even for some local calls these days doesn't help.
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