This is the part where my mom would mention party lines.
In some rural areas there was something like not every house had a unique phone number, but as a side effect you could just pick up the phone and talk to all the people on that same party line at once.
Squatting on a party-line to play WoW is just a wild pairing of technological eras to me. If we go by the invention date of the former they’re more than a century apart (1878).
Yeah back on the days of analogue telephone lines every phone number ultimately required 2 copper wires going all the way from the nearest local exchange to the telephone handset in the home or business, so many smaller towns and rural areas got party lines as a way to save on copper and switching costs. Instead of a dedicated pair of copper wires to every house with a phone, all of the houses on a given block were on one line (all on one electrical circuit), so you’d pick up the phone and be able to talk to (or listen to) your other neighbors without dialing.
Edit to add: in some rural areas they’d even use the barbed wire fences already at farms as a wire for delivering telephone service instead of running new phone lines, sometimes even using Single Wire Earth Return to further reduce copper requirements
This is the part where my mom would mention party lines.
In some rural areas there was something like not every house had a unique phone number, but as a side effect you could just pick up the phone and talk to all the people on that same party line at once.
I lived in a rural area and the nearest phone for emergencies belonged to one house that lived a quarter mile away.
The owner of the phone got hooked on WoW on dial-up at some point and basically ended the party line for everyone.
Squatting on a party-line to play WoW is just a wild pairing of technological eras to me. If we go by the invention date of the former they’re more than a century apart (1878).
Also: rude!
That’s amazing. I’m gonna tell my mom that, she’ll love it.
Yeah back on the days of analogue telephone lines every phone number ultimately required 2 copper wires going all the way from the nearest local exchange to the telephone handset in the home or business, so many smaller towns and rural areas got party lines as a way to save on copper and switching costs. Instead of a dedicated pair of copper wires to every house with a phone, all of the houses on a given block were on one line (all on one electrical circuit), so you’d pick up the phone and be able to talk to (or listen to) your other neighbors without dialing.
Edit to add: in some rural areas they’d even use the barbed wire fences already at farms as a wire for delivering telephone service instead of running new phone lines, sometimes even using Single Wire Earth Return to further reduce copper requirements
The Kinks even wrote a song about it