A technlogical look back

As I was texting a note today to my granddaughter, who in now 12, I started thinking about how I communicated with my friends when I was 12.  For the first few years after we moved out of the town of New Haven to an old country house near the small town of Woodburn we had an old style wall telephone, the kind of big box phone with a crank on the side, an ear piece that dangled on a cord, when it wasn't hung up, and a mouth piece that jutted out of the box.  This was an old fashioned phone even by the standards of the 1950's but it did have some advantages.  We had a party line, with several homes connected to the same line, so we had to listen for our distinctive ring tone to know a call was for us.;  Ours was "two longs and a short" ringgggggggggggg, ringgggggggggggg, ring! When we heard that ring we would pick up.  The catch was that anyone else on the party line could simply pick up their phone and listen in.  There really wasn't any such thing as a  private call.  The advantage to this system was that when my girlfriends and I wanted to talk, one of us called another, others picked up and we could have a three, four or five way conversation. Of course all of the phones were hanging on kitchen or living room walls, areas where family assembled, so these calls couldn't drag on too long, and you couldn't say anything that you didn't want someone in your family to hear - especially a little brother.