New Tech meets Old Tech

I'm a technologist.  And sometimes I have more fun with old technology than new technology.  For seven or eight years we've been without a landline phone, and that works pretty well -- until the owner of the phone is upstairs and the phone is downstairs.  In an effort to expand our phone availability, I went looking for new technology, and found the bluetooth gateways for cell phones can be pretty cool!  The device shown below, connects to the wired phone lines in the house, and when one or both of our smart phones are nearby with bluetooth on,  all the phones in the house ring.

That worked out well, and I wired some more phone jacks in the house. We now have three wired phones. But when I built the shop, I didn't wire it for phone. Well it's wired now, and enter old technology:

The shop has a phone! I value the old power equipment that I have and operate in the shop, and I thought it fitting to have a phone of the same vintage. This particular phone is the Western Electric "space saver" model, from the 1940s. And today it is working again and ringing when I'm home and you call my cell phone! I found this one on eBay, and it was the exact model I sought, because it is the same model that hung on the wall of the kitchen in Raymond when I was a tot. It was replaced with a white plastic wall phone that had a dialer! Our phone number was 278R. When you picked up the phone to call first you checked to see if the party line was free, then the operator would say, "Number, please". So at this point the shop phone is incoming only. It has a dial tone, but no dialer. Ryan has suggested that the ultimate marriage of old tech and new tech would be to hook it up to a PBX server which would say "Number, please", and then using voice recognition, would -- well dial the number!