Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) The Answering Machine - With Toni Trucks!

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Did you know that we could have had the answering machine decades before we actually got to buy one? Why the 1980s and 90s was an unusual time for an innovation explosion in communications technology. The history of the whole AT&T/Ma Bell breakup by the government. And how much did YOU beg your parents to get your own phone line in your bedroom? The guest this episode is the actress Toni Trucks. @tonitrucks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. you know the answering machine was invented decades before we got a chance to use one, but it was buried by a major corporation? What was the funniest outgoing answering machine message you ever left? And how much did you have to beg your parents to get a second phone line? Leave a message after the

tone, because today, Rad, 80s, 90s history is tackling the answering machine and 80s 90s phone tech. Welcome to Rad in 80s, 90s history podcasts, remembering the last two decades of the 20th century when things were still kind of normal and chill. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Today, my extremely lovely special guest is Tony Trucks. Tony has been in movies such as The Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Part 2 and Dreamgirls. You might know her best these days as Lisa Davis on the TV show, Seale Team. But I know her best as one of the three greatest bowlers in Greenpoint Brooklyn, Tony.

Thanks for coming on the show. that's the best introduction I'll ever have, honestly. Well, by the way, I also am drinking coffee out of my SS Badger coffee mug. Well done, sir. Well done. Tony, thanks for coming on. Let me ask you this. We're going to do a grab bag of 80s, 90s tech today, but it's mostly going to be answering machine tech. What is your memory of answering machines growing up?

Do you remember a time when there wasn't one and then one came into your family's life? Oh, I mean, I don't think for a while, before my parents were divorced, I don't remember ever having one. And then I actually, I kind of do remember us getting, it was a big deal. It was a big deal us like figuring out what the outgoing message was going to be. I remember distinctly being at my dad's and like always trying to convince him to do something funny or fun. And he was like, we ended up going with like the automated one that was like, we're not home right now. I'll mouse it. He was like the one that came with the phone, but no vision on his part. Well, I guess that would be actually extremely useful for families that are in multiple houses, back and forth.

In a way, what we have to do with this sort of stuff is, like, you know, people listening that remember this stuff, it's nostalgia. But also, we should, like, explain why you would have an answering machine. So the answering machine was in a way sort of like a family hub. Do you remember being out for the day coming home from school and you would check the answering machine to see how many messages came in over the course of a day? 100% it was like the first thing you did. You like ran through the door and you would see if your answer machine was blinking. If it was blinking, if there was like a little light on it, it was blinking, then you knew you had messages. Also, if you were super fancy, you have like a little timer code thing that would be like it would tell you a number on it. It would tell you the number of messages you had on the phone. Well, that was when they went digital. Do you remember the original answering machines? It was actually, a cassette tape. Right. So you would have to come in and rewind to go back and see what you missed during the day. Totally. Totally. I do remember that. I'm gosh, I'd really dug deep enough. I might have found it. But yeah, I do remember having to like rewind the tape. It was like on an automatic rewind though. Yeah. Yeah. No, I can remember having to like literally as if it were a, uh, a tape deck or something,

having to hit rewind and, oh, that's not far enough. That's not far enough. And then you'd have to erase it because then the space would get clogged up and stuff like that. Yeah. So you were mentioning, so first of all, you would come home and you would hear the calls that were missed and it was, you know, maybe, oh, the doctor calling your appointment is next week or something like that or your friends calling, hey, Tony, do you want to do something tonight or whatever? But also, and I think a lot, a way to think about this is what we use texting for now,

That was what the answering machine was for kids a lot where it's like, hey, mom, I'm staying at Susie's or soccer practice got canceled. So I'm coming home early. So a lot of it was like literal status updates. It was. But I would argue that like, honestly, this platform gave us so much more freedom because you had the wiggle room of like your parents had to be home to get the message. Right. So if your parents were like in transit, from work to home and you left them a message like, hey, I'm going to stay late at, you know, Susie's house. It took time. So you have like this buffer of time. It was so great. And you could always have these, like, I left a message.

I left a message. It wasn't like, it wasn't happening in real time. You always have, you know, space to mess up. Well, and also you could. So people would call in and they would leave a message in it would get recorded. But then also the person with the answering machine would record an outgoing message. And again, before we get into the funny messages and things that people would leave, this was also a status update thing because you could say, we're on vacation for the next week,

or don't expect to hear back from us until after everyone gets home at seven. So, like, you could leave information for other people trying to contact you, essentially. Oh, yeah. That was actually great. I remember, like, it, I know now workplaces have the outgoing email, but, or even the outgoing. Out of office. Yeah. Yeah, the outgoing message was the best. like, hey, we're going to be out of town for this long of time. Or, yeah, it was great. It was great. I'm sure my dad at one point I think, I know, like, my dad was like, me, no, my brother doesn't live here anymore.

Like, if you're a telemarketer, don't call here. All right. So then let's get into the outgoing messages, which people would make funny ones. You know, the thing that jumps to mind almost immediately is nobody's home, nobody's home. Nobody's home. Nobody's home. Nobody's home. Or what you would do, everybody did this at least once where you would pretend that you had picked up the phone.

Hello. Hello. Oh, yeah. People thought you had picked up the phone, but it was actually. So that was my, I hate that one because they fell apart every time and I was always so mad. I had a friend that's like particularly color phone. He always called. And I was like, hey, how you doing? And I was always launching and talking.

He's like, just getting him. You know. Can you remember any memorable? joke ones that you pulled or like, you know, doing an oppression or singing a song or anything like that? Oh, you, I remember the family, you know, families doing like Christmas ones. Right. Yes. You know, it would be like, the Smith-Swish you a Merry Christmas, Smith, Smith, Smith, and you're like, like, those, the holiday themes ones were particularly lovely. And yeah, I'm trying to think of some more.

my dad liked to my dad's very straightforward so he would always like to leave a very somber straight message like hello you reach the trucks residents were not available right now well conversely i was thinking today when i was doing more research on this that this was one of the greatest delivery mechanisms for dad jokes ever invented so i think we're poorer as a society that dads don't have that as a way to make terrible jokes. So, uh, yes. You showed me offline, and this might be a video only thing, but you found your phone with answering machine from college. Oh, yeah. I can, I mean, let me just for the viewers, for those that can't see it, it's been through some things, but. Did you try to see if there is an outgoing message still on

there? There is. There is. Hold, please. Let me see if they, If I can make sure the volume's up. Volume's up to 10. Okay. For those viewers, see if I can do this. You have no messages. Okay, fine. All right, fine.

We know that. We've got no message for then. That's true. I know how thick my Michigan accent is? Oh, wow. You think Tony Trucks I'm not available right now, but leave a message and I'll call you back. Was that, you're saying that was college? It was like 2002, 2003.

Mm-hmm. That's like, this is my senior. your message. So 2003 is the pocket of this. This is where all the boys were calling. You know, this is real. I thought that was going to reel somebody in. That reminds me of another thing, though, thinking of boys calling is one thing that you could do with the answering machine was screen calls. So if you didn't want to answer the phone, but you wanted to find out what the message was, you could just let it play. Yeah. And then you're like, just kidding. I'm hot. Right, if you were willing to talk, right?

Yeah, you could pick it up. You could pick it up mid-answering machine. That's what that was, listen, we're talking about the outpoint messages, but I think of it all the times where I know my mom just didn't pick up. And so my message was, mom, mom, pick up. Mom, just pick up the phone. Mom, you know, like, it wasn't an actual message. It was like, but I know you're home. Well, so let's get into, since this is a history podcast, let's.

get into the history of the answering machine, it might surprise you to know there's actually some interesting history to this technology. For example, would it surprise you to know that we could have had answering machines decades before the 1980s? How'd it have been? Well, right, but in a way, I brought you here under false pretenses because you think you're here to wax nostalgic about these tech when in reality, you're going to get a crash course in the history of deregulation. anti-trust law, Ma Bell. So listeners might have heard of Ma Bell, but maybe everybody has heard of AT&T. For most of the 20th century, we didn't have Verizon, T-Mobile, even things like SBC or Ameritech or Pacific Bell,

things like that, if people remember from the 80s and 90s. There was just AT&T. It was called the Bell system after Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, the company that he created, was the company that AT&T grew out of. This is simplifying things just a bit, but in the early 20th century, when certain new technologies came around, they were granted regulated monopolies by the government. This makes sense. You know, you hear monopoly and you think that's a terrible thing. We want to break up monopolies, and we're going to get to that. But it makes sense in the sense that think of the electric company. You don't want three power plants in a region. You only need one. You don't want the duplication of infrastructure. You don't want, you know, think of cable. Like, cable, they grant a monopoly to a cable company in a region because you don't want five different cable companies laying fiber to everybody's house or like stringing cable on the phone lines or whatever. There's too much duplication and things like that. Now, I am alighting over a bunch of details that readers of Tim Wu's books would be mad at me for simplifying. But the same thing happened with the telephone, because the

The U.S. government wants one reliable nationwide network for communications. And I'm talking about the timeline of the turn of the 20th century. So the 1900s, the 19-teens, the 1920s, they want what is called a common carrier. They want one system that is reliable, but they want that one system to not be able to discriminate over who is using your lines, right? Okay. In a way, think of electricity again. Like if GE runs the power plant and then they charge less money if you buy a GE washing machine,

but charge more money if you buy a non-GEE washing machine, like that's sort of the common carrier thing. No discrimination. In modern parlance, it would be similar argument to what net neutrality is on the internet. Charge the same, offer the same level of service. Don't discriminate over who connects to your network. Sounds good, right? good deal, except what we know about monopolies is they tend to not be good at innovation because there's no competition to force them to be innovative. AT&T basically had a monopoly for most of the 20th century in the United States for especially long-distance communication over telephone lines.

They tried to bend over backwards to show that they could innovate, and thus the famous Bell Labs, which was this, research lab that, I mean, is legendary for a reason. They invented the transistor which led to computers. They invented the laser. They invented the solar cell. They invented the concept of cellular phones of sending transmission signals via satellite, up to satellites down to space. The problem is, so Bell Labs, again, is rightfully famous. But one of the things that you would notice if you look at their inventions is that AT&T doesn't develop and monetize. or productize a lot of these inventions. Some of them just sit in, you know, drawers back in their labs gathering dust.

Some are picked up by other companies. Because AT&T is a monopoly, they do not necessarily want their monopoly disrupted. They're making tons of money, bankrolled and backed by the government, allowed to by the government. It is the innovator's dilemma on steroids when you have a huge monopoly. So, Tony, take a guess at when the answering machine... I'm going to say 1932. Listen, Price is right rules you've gone over, but you're very close. It's 1935.

It was invented at Bell Labs by someone named Benjamin Thornton, and he developed a machine to record voice messages from a caller on... actual tape. Tape as a technology, magnetic tape was a recent invention at the time, and Bell Labs sat on it, AT&T sat on it. They did not offer it to the public because they didn't want to. If you and I, do you remember what your phone looked like when you were a kid on the YouTube video, I'll find pictures to overlay here now, but, you know, that's sort of like soft sort of thing. And that it was rotary at first, but then it was touched out. But do you remember how everybody's phone looked the same when we were kids, right? A hundred percent. You want to know why that was? Because they were all

made me pro-labs. And they wouldn't let anyone else create phones. You could get one type of phone, the phone that the phone company produced and allowed you to connect to their system. No, are you thinking like we had, we had color choices, didn't we? There were color choices and slightly different models. And then, you know what, we need to lay a little bit of groundwork again. In a way, what non-80s kids won't remember is that the phones were all courted. So often it was in a central place in the home. So you couldn't necessarily have private conversations because it was in one place. It was sort of like the family TV or later on the family computer, which was often out in the open. The big innovation that they gave us, they thought us worthy to

receive in the... Two phone lines. Well, no, no, no, not even yet. No. No, I mean, in the same home, like two options. Like, you could talk in the kitchen or the living. You could get there. But actually, we're going to come back to that in a second because that was, that was something

that was, that only came in in the late 80s and early 90s. At least they wanted you to have this. But what I'm saying is, the big innovation was moving from rotary, a dial, a spinning dial to push button. That was the big innovation from basically the 60s into the 70s and the 80s. Yes. So this. But wait, but we don't, we need to say also, just because it was push didn't mean that it wasn't going,

tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Sure, right. It doesn't mean it was going beep, boop, beep, poop, that was a different thing. The technology, that was based on actual, like, sound tones. That's why hackers, the earliest hackers, before there were computer hackers, would, they would hack phone lines, because if you could match the tone of what was dialed out, like either the click, click, click, or the, whatever, you could get free calls. So, among other people, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak invented devices before they started making

computers to do what they called phone freaking, which was basically a way to hack the phone system to get free long distance calls. Because, again, maybe we need to lay this. You had to pay local calls. You paid a certain dollar figure per month within your area code. That's why we have area codes. Outside the area code, long distance, you paid by the minute. It was expensive.

That was the cash cow for 18. You never hear this anymore, but I remember so often growing up, it was regularly said, it's long distance. I'm calling long distance. Right. You know, that was always like, I'm calling you long. It was ammunition. Right. Or your grandmother would rush you off the phone because she was horrified by the amount of

money you were spending to call her. long distance. Like, we've been on for 15 minutes. Okay, get off, get off. Because wasn't there also, there was, we all knew there was a certain amount of time that you could stay on and it would be cheaper. But then if you went beyond that, then like the rates ratcheted up. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. The long distance calling. I forget that. So to bring it back to the technology itself, AT&T does not allow people to, you can't just create your own phone or your own device and plug it into their network. And their argument is in the same way that Apple says, well, we can't open the app store because it's not secure and it's unsafe for users. And

they made that argument time and time again. And not just, you know, hey, US government, we can't allow this because what if the phone network goes down and the Russians attack and, you know, no one can talk to each other. It was also they literally made the argument that if you connect things to the network that they don't support, someone could, a phone company worker could be out there on the line working on it and they'll get electrocuted. No, stop. So there were people and companies that tried to commercialize the answering machine. One was called Telmagnet, which was offered in the United States in 1949.

It played outgoing messages and recorded incoming messages on a magnetic wire. It was priced at $200, which was very expensive for 1949, so it was not a commercial success. There was also the electronic secretary, and it was kind of state of the art, but it used a 45-rpm record player, so imagine, forget tapes. Oh, my gosh, that's so funny. It's recording messages on. I wonder why none of these ever took off, huh? Gosh, well, I think of, like, Barbara Streisand, like, as a seven-year-old going into a booth in, you know, New York to record. Her single.

a song in her tiny little record she came out with, right? This also made like collect calling a very big deal. Like you don't hear about collect calls as much unless, you know, you have ready family members in jail. But like, you know, the collect call isn't, that was such a big deal. Like I'd like my brother would call collect from college. So let's explain that. If I am a poor college student and I'm calling home to my mother, can, you know,

early enough on, you could call the operator and a human being would get on and you'd say, I want to place a collect call. Yeah, the operator would come on. And she'd be like, how can I, operator, how can I help you? And then the operator would dial your mother and say, will you accept a collect call from Tony Trucks? Yes. And you could say yes or no. And if you said yes, then your mother would be billed for that long distance call and you would not. Right. Exactly. We will come back to 1-800 collect and all that stuff in a second. So the quintessence. device that was a decade-long battle to try to connect to the phone company was something called hushaphone, which was invented in 1920. Again, look at how far back from the 80s we are.

The hushaphone, you know how when you put your mouth over the phone like this to try to muffle you? Okay, so the hushaphone was basically just a cup that you would put over the mouth part of the receiver so that let's say I feel like I've seen these they would market it as if you're in the office and you don't want to you don't want your your secretary or your co-workers to hear your important business call put this over it's it's literally a cup you could take a you know a plastic cup or a solo cup and imagine you just cut it out that's all it is nothing complicated nothing technological and somebody retired off of that you know well wait they did not so the hush of phone was the product of Harry C. Tuttle, president of the hushaphone company, and he keeps trying to

market this, and for various reasons, AT&T says you can't connect to this. It degrades the quality of the call. 1948 protest to the Federal Communications Commission asking them to order the phone company to authorize the use of the device. The phone company delayed, delayed. The hearing occurred in 1950. Again, delay, delay, delay. This is, you know, it's a quasi-governmental entity AT&T at this point. It has the backing of the government. It has the backing of CIA, the military, because this is a national security sort of thing in the eyes of the government. So they delay issuing a ruling to 1955, five years later. The ruling states that the unrestricted use of the hushaphone could result in a general deterioration of the quality of interstate and foreign telephone service.

So they reject it. The rejection was overturned a year later in a U.S. Court of Appeals suit Hushafone versus United States with the decision stating, and this is important, historically I'm going to quote this, that the Hushaphone ruling was, quote, an unwarranted interference with the telephone subscribers right to reasonably use his or her telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without becoming publicly detrimental. And so they're saying your notion that using a cup over the phone is going to ruin the network is bananas. And also the consumer, the user of the network, has a private interest in using the network in the way that they want. The reason that I quoted that particular line is that is going to be the key ruling and that sentence of the ruling is

going to be key to the eventual breakup of AT&T, of their monopoly. Oh, okay. So this is a hugely famous case in antitrust law and eventually get settled in 1984, which is why, as 80s kids, we're going to get a whole bunch of technology that we're going to get to. It was the Nixon administration first that started to try to break up AT&T, so a Republican administration. It was the Reagan administration.

that pushed through the final breakup of AT&T. Now, you think Republicans, they would be, you know, they're pro business or whatever, but at the same time, they're pro competition. And the phone company had gained a reputation for being incredibly, Tony, here's something that you could not do. If you did want to set up a new phone line, you know the phone jack that we're, yeah. So you just plug it in and go.

That was something that I think it was not until the next. the government forced them to use that technology. Before the phone jack, if you wanted to install a new phone or a second phone line, you had to have the phone company repairman come to your house and install it as if he were wiring electricity or something like. And so again, it's like the priesthood of they don't want anybody messing with their stuff, messing with their network. It seems very Apple adjacent and it's like we're the only ones that can do us. Right. So the Nixon Ford Carter and the eventually Reagan administration, the FCC's for all of those administrations, keep trying to open the doors a crack. Things like MCI, if you remember MCI from the 90s Microwave Communications Incorporated, was someone that was a company that was formed to allow long-distance service via microwave towers, as opposed to these long-distance telephone lines. And the microwave towers were initially just between Chicago and St. Louis. AT&T fought

tooth and nail. You can see the forerunner of the cellular industry there, but again, it's not AT&T that's moving towards cellular. It's people trying to go against the monopoly. Here's another one. Fax technology was invented decades before. Again, faxes are something that became prominent in the 80s and 90s. Could have had it earlier. The ability to send pictures via phone lines, I think was invented in the 30s or the 40s. Wow. Why not make that a product? AT&D doesn't have to.

They're making tons and tons of money allowed to by the government because it's a monopoly. And also, again, their cash cow is the long-distance calling. So, again, when we're talking about what did you use the answering machine for things that you would send as text now? Or instead of trying to, I don't know, sending a fax. What they were afraid of is things like sending a fax or saving a message would discourage you from making an expensive long-distance phone call. They want you to make those long-distance phone calls. They don't want anything that's sort of a shortcut around that. So, a 1982 after basically two decades of the government trying through various legal mechanisms and actual antitrust lawsuits, trying to break up AT&T,

In the United States versus AT&T, it's finally decided that AT&T is a monopoly. And in 1984, the government finally has a ruling that breaks up AT&T and the Bell system into what we would all know as the baby bells. AT&T, the bigger company, keeps the long distance, but there are seven independent regional holding companies, also known as regional bell operating companies or RBOCs. colloquially known as baby bells. Okay. So what was your, like, what was the baby bell, the phone company when you were a kid growing up?

I feel like, yeah, there was, there was Pack Bell, right? Well, or I think Ameritech might have been the one in. Oh, in Michigan, yeah, Ameritech, yeah, sure. Yeah, AT&T Ameritac, yeah. So you had next in the Northeast Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Southwestern Bell, which eventually became SBC, Bells. South in the South and U.S. West in the West. They basically, these baby bells get the local calls. AT&T maintains the long distance calls, which again, which is why you would have the local call

bill and then the long distance call bill. But the door hasn't been cracked open. It has been blown wide open because what also in this ruling is allowed is basically a Cambrian explosion of new phone technology that AT had been sitting on or not allowing to have happened. And this brings us back to what you and I remember from our childhood. So actually, my notes were, here's the thing on the fax machine. The fax machine was invented in 1924. That's insane. Like, I feel like it really didn't gain popularity until the 80s and 90s.

And it was largely a business thing. Like, by the late, a lot of us had fax machines in our houses. for, especially if your parents were doing business or something like that. And so, but business people, back when there were things called actual business cards, you would have your phone number on it, you would have a fax number on it. You'd even see it like early days email. People would say, like, I always say that this is my number, this is my fax number. Gosh, yeah.

The facts, I have to say that I feel like people are still asking for faxes where. after they should have. You know, once the technology changes, there's like, you faxing and I was like, who's, I remember so many times early days living in Los Angeles, where I would be like, they want me to fax them and going to Kinko's and be like fax for me. Well, and weirdly banks and stuff still ask for your fax number in case. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that is definitely on the way out with things like being able to just take a picture. Take a picture. The picture is huge. Yeah. Like, I love that now. You could, you know. Well, here's another piece of technology that got kicked loose, as we mentioned before, cordless phones. Do you remember first time that you had a cordless phone? And how mind-blowing was it? Now, again, as kids and teens, it was essential because then you could go in your room and have a private conversation that your brother or your mother or whomever couldn't listen in on. But also, do you remember just the eye? You could walk outside with it. You imagine.

that to have a phone call, there would often be a chair next to where the phone was so that you could sit down. You could just do whatever. You could be making dinner. You could walk all over your house. Well, two things. Like, our phone lived on a chair, right? It just lived on a chair in the corner for this purpose. But it also makes me think back, you know, you sometimes see those like old-timey movies where if someone's in a club and they get a phone call. And it's like the longest cord you've ever seen. Oh, right. They literally bring the court out to the table. Yes. You're like, how long is this board? You know? And so I was like feeling that you must, you know,

AT&T must have been making specifically custom cords for the fanciest clubs in town. But, you know, the cordless phone, also what it did was you could go anywhere, but it put you a little out of practice because that meant you needed to also remember to go put the phone back. To charge it. The venom that came from my mother when a phone call would. come in and then we would come with the realization that the cordless wasn't charged was like, it was like, put the damn thing.

You know, I wonder if that was one of the first things like that, because a lot of things had double A or triple A batteries. And, you know, as a father now, I'm that guy that's running around charging everyone's devices. Your iPad, we're leaving the house. You might as well put it on the charge. You know, I wonder if that was the first thing like that. I can't think of something elsewhere it was like, you've got to make sure it's charged or something. No. Yeah, no, no, no. I think that was a big deal. I remember you would put it. it on the charger and, oh yeah, like, look, you can even see here, right? Like, my little light app thing.

Yeah, yeah. The ones that are listening, like, if I put it back on the charger, a little light comes on that says I'm charging, right? Right, right. Right. There was also weirdly, do you remember this at all? There was sort of like a, not a moral panic, but a sort of panic or pearl clutching about the idea that, because now with the wireless, you're sending the signal back to the base

station that was actually wired into the phone line. And so people were afraid that, oh, people, your neighbors are listening in on your calls. I don't know if it was because the early technology of that was so piss poor that you could hear other people's calls. Didn't you ever have that happen? I did. Did you really? Okay. I would be on our phone call. I would be on the phone. And all of the sudden I was, I don't know, got messed up at the switchboard or what's going on.

But like, I could hear somebody else's call. Yeah, I can remember that. hear me, but I would be able to hear them. I'm like, I can hear, like, or I'd be talking to somebody and all of a sudden we would realize that we were also hearing somebody else talk. Yeah, I wonder if like whatever the radio band was that they put those on early on were, were just so weak or, again, the technology might have gotten better or something like that. Yeah, but I definitely, that was, that was definitely a thing. I don't know why, but yeah. Okay, so let's get to.

having your own line, which I found an article from the New York Times from 1995 where they're saying it was the biggest single year increase in new residential phone lines in the United States since the end of World War II. The percentage of households with more than one line has nearly doubled this year to 16%. It's predicted that by the year 2000, as many as half of the nation's 97 million households will have two or more phone lines. Here's why this is happening, because again, the baby Bells are given essentially, it is a regulated monopoly again, it's just a regional monopoly, but they don't have the cash cow of the long distance, so they're looking for revenue streams. And so it becomes a concerted marketing effort to be like, hey, just like one car garage is great,

but you know what's better is a two-car garage, two phone lines. And the idea of working from home or working remotely or being reachable by your work at your house was something that I don't think was a thing at all in the 70s, and it started to become in the 80s. So the first thing that they market to is you need a business line that's separate. You need your office line. Right. But then, then they see the dollar signs when they think of us. They think of the teens.

They think of the youth. Now, do you remember talking your parents into getting a second line? Hell yes. What did you have? Oh, my gosh. well, first of all, it was, it was actually a short sell because my mother hated dealing with us in most capacity. She just was like, I don't want to deal with these kids. And so we're like, bleats, can we have what is lovingly referred to as the teen line?

The teen line. And now, listen, we need to also highlight for the audience members here, your listeners, that this is back when the phone book was still happening. Right. So all of the sudden, you're looking in the phone book, the white pages, white pages purse are. like people, right? Yellow pages are business. Businesses. Right? So you're looking in the white pages. You go trucks, trucks, trucks, trucks, there's Mary trucks. And then right underneath. So I got my

regular phone line right in the right under the line is the teen line. So I have my own mind-blowing. It was like my first real taste of autonomy. This is sort of an aside, but I think one of the things that when you tell people, younger people, that this was possible, there was a time when everybody's phone number was not only public, it was published on a yearly basis by the phone company.

That's right. You had a fourth grade teacher. You could figure out what their phone number was. I mean, do we need a spin-off episode just about prank calling? Because I had access to every teacher's phone number. Right. You know what? Save that for when we do Star 69.

So the other, so first of all, the teen line is youth, I mean, I guess it wasn't a thing in the 70s. or prior to the 80s, that teenagers would be, you'd come home from school and you might be on the phone for two, three, six hours till 1 a.m. with your friends. Yes. Yes. And so it becomes a necessity. Again, I don't know when that became a thing, but by the time I was in middle school and high school, it was like, yeah, this is what you do. You come home from school and you're on with your friends all all afternoon. So, right, your parents, they need to get calls so you can make the argument that it's necessary. Absolutely, absolutely. And also, I think having the listeners not only is your number public to everybody, it's in a book, anyone can call you, and not only

that every call that you're getting in your formative years has to go through your parents first, like just mortifying. So the incarnation, the invention of, the teen line, the introduction of this, it was a gift to teens everywhere. Well, but think of what a phone, a phone would be in my bedroom. In your bedroom. So that's, that's the revolution of autonomy is you have the cordless phone so you can have private conversations in your bedroom. Then you have a line that is only yours and probably that phone is in your bedroom. Like, yes, the, oh my gosh. Just the, the autonomy, that revolution in having that sort of independence and privacy. I still remember my teen line phone number. It was so pivotal in my life. So, 23, 6, 9, 6.9. And, you know, as a teenager, the fact that there was a 6-9 in there, it was huge.

Oh, geez. I miss that, but yes. Well, also, well, you mean you're not 15 anymore? Do you, do you remember, I still have memorized my first girlfriend's phone number? No, I think I've lost it. You know so many phone numbers still, though. I could, I could, do you? I've lost. them all. I've lost them all. I got him. I got him. I know all my girlfriend's phone numbers from from, from Chabwe. Because, again, you would call them every day, multiple times a day, so they're memorized. Did you, did your friends do the thing where if you could spell out a word with the number? Because I, again, I don't know if people know this, but there would be letters on the, the numbers of the, yeah. And so somebody had a phone number that the numbers spelled risk. So they would always be like, my, my phone number is 277. risk or something. That was super cool. My cousins was like a 7-2-3 self. That was the big one. Her third three self. Okay. Well, let's continue with the, the technology explosion that the breakup of AT&T allows. R-69. Star 69 is, there's the famous R-EM song, Star 69. I know you called,

I know you called. Somebody calls, hangs up. Star 69, you get the number and you can find out who called you. Yep, call them right back. Best thing ever. Like, somebody calls you, they'd prank you, whatever. You just star 69. Or somebody, like, it rings once. That was the things. I remember it had to ring twice in order for you to do Star 69.

Now, there was also Star 67, but I feel like... Oh, 67. So Star 67, if you hit it before you dialed somebody, it blocked the ability to do Star 69. But I felt like that came out later. Like, Star 69 came first, and then, It was almost like an innovation to add star 67 maybe. Well, listen, we're like, we're really getting into some high-tech stuff here.

Okay, you want to do the star 67 to ax out the star 69, and we're not even talking about the three-way call. Oh, I didn't even put that in my notes. All right, tell us about three-way calling. Don't you remember the three-way calling? Okay, so like, as I recall, what you would do is you would dial your friend, and then if you wanted to make a number call, a different call, but to add in a call, you could, and this was the source of a lot of drama.

You see it on mean girls. There's a very, like, prominent thing where she had three-way calls and she doesn't tell the other person, so they just start talking shit about each other. But you would press the hang-up button. What is that called? I guess the hang-up. Or the cradle or something? Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. Press the hang-up button. Yeah, yeah. There's a little hang-up button. And you would press it twice or you would hold it down, and then you would lift it back up and you get a new dial tone. And then once that started your ring, you would press the cradle again, and then you would all be on together, and you would do three-way. But that was the limit.

Three-way, that's it. Let me give you another, well, actually, before I get to another technology thing, we mentioned things like calling collect. Also, so there are competitors to AT&T that come out. So if you remember watching TV at all, any commercials, like MCI and Sprint. MCI would just advertise constantly because they're trying to go after the cash cow of AT&T long distance. And suddenly there's competition. So literally, you couldn't watch a TV show where there wasn't one MCI or Sprint commercial in the 90s. 1-800 collect, I believe was an AT&T product.

But there was competing ones as well. Oh, no, that was 1-800 call ATT. And then 1-800 collect with somebody else. So again, a product, a multi-probably billion-dollar product was, hey, we're going to brand a new collect-calling brand, and maybe people will use that. Again, people are just chipping away at the AT&T long-distance cash cow. My dad, when I went to college, my dad engaged a service where you could pay to attach your home phone line. make it a 1-800 number. And that's what people might not remember is that 1-800. If it was a 1-800, it means it's free. One-900 was the, oh, I didn't put that in my notes.

That was- You're paying for it. Remember one. So my dad, for years I had in my brain this 1-800 number, like if I was out of the country or something, or out of the state, because long distance was still a thing, right? Right. Yeah, absolutely. If I was in Ann Arbor and wanted to call Manistee, Michigan, in, I would call this 1-800 number. We have even talked about long distance is one thing within the country. Overseas long distance. The international long distance? Way more expensive even than that.

Oh, yeah. Way, way, way. And I can't believe all the things that I didn't put in my notes. The 1-900 numbers, because again, now these were late-night commercials, but the 1-900 numbers must have been something else that also got kicked up after the AT&T breakup. And the 1-900 numbers were the sexy time. That was a sexy time. That was like the skin and max numbers where you're like, yeah, that was like the fully the skin and max numbers. They call 1-800. What was the, didn't Spike Lee do a movie about somebody being a phone sex worker or something? Anyway, that was a whole thing, which I guess now is only fans or I don't know.

Do you know when phone sex became a profitable thing here, right? I did not. I just said, I didn't occur to me to research that, but I wish I had. Something tells me that didn't exist in the 70s. No, I don't think. The fact that there were movies and, again, moral panics about it, that I remember, says to me that that was an innovation of the time. Yeah. That probably was shaken loose by the AT&T breakup as well. Okay, Pagers.

And you would get those. Remember? Also to your point, when you would sometimes, you were getting what we would think of as spam, right, calls on your answer machine. So occasionally you would get, it was some 1-800 like, you called, you know, 1-900, ladies, lady, lady. And that would be in your answer machine. You're like, oh, it's just junk, it's junk. So there was still that presence of, like, junk messaging, junk mail happening with the early answering machines. Okay, so Pagers, I graduated high school in 96.

I feel like they started to come in around 93-94, and the joke always was, well, the only people that had pagers are drug dealers. But the truth was, at least in Southwest Florida, that the only people that had pagers were the rich kids. For us, like, I mean, I was in a very small community, and I was, you know, not at an age to have a pager. But, like, for us, it was always the doctors. Like you would, they would never, they would say silence your cell phones. It wasn't a thing, obviously. But if you go to see a play or something or a movie. Silenced your pagers.

But it was accepted that if a pager went off, it was a bona fide emergency. A baby was being born. Like the fax machine, it was a business use case first that eventually they broadened out to, hey, this could be a consumer product. And it was a status symbol. And there's the Missy Elliott song, Beat Me, 911, call me on your cell phone. I'll call you back to see what you're going to tell me. So the kids that I knew, again, the rich kids, what would a pager be? It would be on your belt.

And all that would happen is it would buzz because you called it like a number. Your pager had a number. But this wasn't a cell phone, so you couldn't talk. All you could do was enter in the number pad numbers. So 911 is emergency call me back, right? It would show you the number that was calling. Who called you? Right. So you would know who called you. And then we all came up with various codes.

And you would, you know, your boyfriend would give you a code to be like, you know, what would you say, you up? You know, like that's what I don't think. Maybe it was 69, like your phone number or something. I don't know. So again, this is, this is technology that you could have had before the AT&T breakup. But you didn't have. Why do you have it in the 80s and 90s is because the baby bells want this. local stuff because your pay-trip wouldn't necessarily be for long distance. It would just be for

local calling and legitimate emergencies and things like that. Which brings us to the cell phone. We're winding things down here. I believe I got my first cell phone in the year 2000. Can you place your first cell phone? I got my first cell phone in August of 1999. I was going into my freshman year at University of Michigan, and my parents were driving me into Ann Arbor to drop me off at the dorm, and we saw a T-Mobile. They made a split decision. I actually still have it, but I think it's in Michigan,

but I still have my very first cell phone that I got from T-Mobile, and they got me a plan. And at that point, it was, you know, Jankey. It was minutes, right? So you get so many minutes. So that's the thing is mine was from Singular, which Singular grew out of whatever. But again, the baby bells, they innovate in the cell phone business taking off because the idea was not that you would use the cell phone to do long distance calls. If you're going to do long distance calls, you're still going to do it on a landline. The cell phone was initially, again, a business thing, like in the movie Wall Street where what's his name, Michael, who's the actor, he's on the beach and he's using a cell phone and he's calling Charlie Sheen and he's like, I can't. Michael Douglas. Yes, Michael, I'm thinking.

Yes. So originally business, rich people, but then by the late 90s, the reason the baby bells market this is because the intention is not that you're going to make long distance calls. You're not going to call your grandmother and talk for an hour. You're just using this again to talk to your mom or your boyfriend or like, here's what's, where are you? Let's meet up and that sort of thing. They're incentivized to do that because this is a new revenue stream for them.

Do you remember the first few years of using a cell phone? you would never call anyone long distance on it because it was so expensive. And you only had minutes. So even locally, you could run out of minutes and you would be like, hey, listen, don't call me for the rest of the week because the month is going to end and it's going to roll over and I'll get more minutes again. You're like, oh my gosh. Yeah, totally, totally.

You're always kind of thinking about 500 minutes to start or something like that, which seems like an eternity, but you just flew through it, you know? And your phone would be, as I recall, I'd have a counter on it. it would say like how many minutes I had left, you know. Oh, that was useful. I feel like I used to have to call the 1-800 number, and they'd tell me how many minutes I had left or something. Yeah.

Do you remember the first phone you had? Mine was a Nokia, that little tiny one that was like this big? Mine was it, mine was like larger than that. It was kind of like a brick. And it was, I recall that it was red. For some reason, I felt like I needed a leather case for it. Don't ask me why. I had a rather large antenna, but what I really remember about it is there was the adoption of phone etiquette didn't exist.

Like, we just didn't have it, right? So I remember being in a very important meeting with the department that I was in the musical theater department. The, you know, program director was up speaking. And my phone goes off in front of like 100 students. and I stand up. I put my finger up to the direct of the program. I put my finger up and I was like, I'll be right back.

I've got to take this, you know. Waltz out of the auditorium. And then came in like, I'm like, it was my boyfriend. So sorry. Lottie da. Look at her. She's, yeah. Like, it didn't even occur to me like, I don't know, silence it, turn it up, you know.

Sending people to voicemail also wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, I remember it wouldn't, it didn't even occur to me to send someone. to voicemail. We always, in our normal lives, you had to let it ring. Yeah. The voicemail. Yeah. So I would never, I would always, it would just be ringing and ringing and ringing. So now we know that like, you know, to your point, like, if you're in public and somebody's just letting their phone ring, we're like, what's the matter with you? Send them to voicemail. This is, this is slightly outside of 80s and 90s, but you mentioning boyfriend, there's a specific relationship that I remember texting becoming a thing. And this was two, three, 2003 fall. Yep. Then remember, how many, what, did you only get like 30 texts a month initially or something

like that? Yeah. And after that, it was a dollar a text. It was insane. No, I remember the first texting experience I had. I was studying abroad in London and the particular, whatever random phone I got when I was abroad, had a text feature. And I was like, this is so dumb.

And I was staying, one of my, um, other students was staying in the apartment above me, and he's texted me something. And I was like, what an idiot. Call me. Like, why would you text to me? This is so stupid. And we sort of texted back and forth. And like, by the end of the evening, I was like, this is kind of fun, you know, but there was a long chunk of time there. I was like, texting is so dumb. Like, how lazy are you? Pick up the phone. Well, I remember the exact moment that the inverse of that happened to me, where I was on a trip with somebody and were in two separate cars. And they keep calling to say, like, turn left and then hang up. And I was like,

MF or just send me a text. You don't have, I'm not going to pick up the phone every time you have two words to say to me. Yeah, totally, totally. So to wrap this up, we're going to have to come back to regulation and antitrust. Because what have we got today? We have essentially three carriers. If YouTube video listeners you will see on the screen graph that shows all of the baby bells and all the phone companies, they're just AT&T, they split up. And then they slowly come back together into one as mergers and people acquire everybody.

This all came about thanks to the Clinton administration, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, which again the argument was we're allowing more competition in the telephone and the communication space. But really what it did was it opened the floodgates to, let's just let everybody buy everyone and reconsolate into monopolies again. The argument could be made that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is what allowed the explosion of cellular technology to happen. Again, more detailed and wonkier, nerdyer podcast can adjudicate that. But I will say that one of the things that to bring it to modern times that people would understand is when you had things like ringtones or the early part of getting the inner. internet on your phone or the weird little apps before the iPhone that the phone companies would offer you, it's almost like they were hearkening back to the AT&T days because Verizon would only

allow a certain type of app. Then AT&T wouldn't allow it or singular wouldn't allow it. And they would charge an arm and a leg so they would keep 90% of the revenue of ringtones and things like that. So in a way, it harkens back to the AT&T monopoly of, well, We don't want you on our network, and so we're controlling things. Today, this is being recorded at the tail end of 2024. One of the big tech news stories of the year is the slow breaking up of the Apple and Google Monopoly of the app stores, where they're charging 30% of revenue for apps on phones, which sounds insane. Why are, why do you have to give 30% of every dollar,

for an app to Apple or Google, that seems like a pretty extreme Vig, and people like Epic Games and Spotify have been fighting this in various jurisdictions for years. Here's the reason why the 70-30 split became the normal is because before the iPhone and before the app store, the singulars of the world, the Verisans of the world, if you wanted an app on their phone, they would take 90%. So when Steve Jobs announces the app store, if you watch the video of that announce, it's a huge, like, roaring cheer because developers are like, oh, my God, we can actually build businesses off of this. 30% seemed like a fair deal at the time. Now that the entire app economy is the way it is, it doesn't feel fair. but that's the sort of accident of history that led us to the sort of, again, monopoly and sort of

anti-competitive stuff that we see in the app stores today. That is wild. I had no idea. Let me, thinking of the iPhone and things like that, one more thing that we were promised in the 80s and 90s forever was video calling. Isn't it funny that, like, video calling in AT&T commercials in the 80s and 90s, like, wow, this is the G-Wizz. Like, flying cars and video calling, this is the future, man. And now it's just like a frigging app. Like, the things that the smartphone has obviated that seem to be the fact that you can take a picture of something and translate from a different language,

if you had invented that in 1970, you could have charged $10,000 for that, that amazing sci-fi device. I mean, what you and I are doing right now wasn't like, you know, commonplace, but on the Jetsons, you know, the cartoon, the Jetsons, right? The futuristic cartoon. I mean, I was at boarding school on a pay phone to call my parents. And if I came back from class, we would all, there would be sticky notes lined up on the desk of all of our messages. That was our texting. It didn't exist. So we would just be like, oh, your mom called Jackal. I remember distinctly, I came back one time and it said, you know, Pat saw he'll call. He'll call. He wants to know if you'll go. at homecoming, and I'm like... Well, so one point that I want to make is that, in a way, we were there for the golden age

of this sort of gadgetry, where this technology was given to us. And in a way, it's sort of like back to boring snooze stuff. Every phone is the same, slab of glass, and sure, new apps come along, and they do new things, but like we just went through a litany of answering machines, pagers, all this stuff. The technology sort of just seems to be commoditized and boring now. And somehow we were around for this weird Cambrian explosion of communications tech that, again, has all been subsumed into the smartphone and social networking. But it was just, in a way, we were kind of lucky to be there for something a little magical, I guess.

Yeah, we didn't even realize it was happening as, as per always is the thing. You know, you don't even realize what's going on, you know, what you're missing. One last thing, specifically about the answering machine, but maybe cell phones as well, because you are someone that works in TV and movies. The plot contrivance of the answering machine has an ability to do exposition dumps. Think of how many, you know, Seinfeld episodes or things like that where it's like, you need to move the plot along.

And so what you do is have the character hit the button on the answering machine. And it's Glenn Close saying, I just boiled your kids rabbit or something. Yeah, yeah. Or, again, do the data tough. Well, you know, by the way, they're coming for you. Get out of there. Like that sort of, you know, people have talked a lot also about how there's so many old movies where the plot, if you had had a cell phone, the plot would not have happened. because you would have just been like, hey, get out of there.

They're coming for you. Right. So I'm wondering, has that been something that you've heard screenwriters, producers, people talk about that it's harder? That was such an easy cheat to have the answering machine do the exposition dump or, or how do you have this character not know if all they have to do is pick up their cell phone? Like, is that something that comes up in scripts and, and plots and stuff. God, I don't see it as much anymore, but it's interesting you're mentioning

this, like, for two reasons. One, I just revisited one of my favorite movies, which is my best friend's wedding. And you get a major plot point right at the beginning of that movie someone calls and leaves, you know, a message that tells you, like, or catapult. Think of Sleepless in Seattle. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Well, you know, I, You know, sometimes it is art imitating life, though. This is like putting my family on blast a little, but I, when I was 12, we came home to a message on our answer machine that was like, hey, your brother's girlfriend, you know, like your son's girlfriend's pregnant. Click. Like that was the message.

You were like, see that, and that is a thing that would have happened in a movie that would have been an easy sort of way to. I was like, real life. And then two days later, I had a nephew. You know what I mean? I was like, oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. that ability to advance the plot in a really easy way. Like, what do we, what do, the workarounds now is like they have little text bubbles that go up. Like, does that happen in your show? Like, sometimes, too, where it's like you'll do the text overlay to do the thing that like, again. The cry on, whatever, like she's filling you, like what's going, like where you are, what's happening five days later. Yeah. Well, and also, wait, as an actor, when I moved to New York, this is 2003, when you got your headshots, it didn't just say Tony Trucks.

it had a service number on it. So that was my answering the service. The whole business had a 2-1-2 number that was solely for the purpose of casting directors and agencies leaving me answering messages. And like now they just don't exist. But like I'm telling you, I've got hundreds of headshots of this answering service. And I paid for years. I was like, I'm like, what if I need my service number again, you know? and just like things that, but that was the thing that, oh, you have a callback. Oh, you booked a job,

did it, da, da, that all happened through your answering service. It's funny when I'm doing these episodes, a lot of the nostalgia is wasn't that fun. And sometimes it's, wasn't it better that way? Nothing that we're talking about is better. Today is better. It's impossible not to know things. It's impossible. I know to, like, within a three-foot radius of where my wife is right now. Right. Which I get a notification when she swipes. her card and she's coming home on the train or, you know, like, or you can look up anything on Wikipedia or something. Well, wouldn't it stress you out if you had to, like, wait to get home to check your answering

machine to see if, like, your daughter needed something? But I wonder, but, but, or is what the agita and anxiety of modern life is that you're bombarded with that stuff? So there was a segmented sort of, there are times, you could be out of the house and unreachable. I love it. Right. I love being unreachable.

So imagine we're saying, what we've just described nostalgically, on a quantifiable basis is things are better now. But on an emotional basis, we're kind of being like, I miss that. Well, like, to your point, in the 80s, the office line was introduced, right? But other than that, people are like, if I'm at home with my family, you can't reach. I'm not on the clock. But now they're having to like make rules about when your bosses can reach you, right? My favorite thing to do is to be on a plane.

Yeah. Good point. I'm not even, I'm not even pretending to try to get on the Wi-Fi. I'm all like, I was on a plane. Perfect analogy. Because we have no real ability, unless you make the choice, we have no real ability to, what are we describing? You don't hear that annoying message.

from your boss until you get home and check your message. You don't hear that thing from your kid until you get home and check your message. And right, it's better that I know where my kids are right now within five seconds. But also, hey, there was a time when human beings, society got by forever with it. It's just like, I'll find out when I can find out. I don't have to know right now. And I don't have to get a notification instantaneously. No, like so-and-so's on the road. If you're on a road trip, that's why they changed that by message, right? If there was going to be full days where you were road-tripping. It's like, you won't be able to reach me, right? Or think about, and this is, this is maybe getting a little too dark, but like,

like, if a loved one died right now, you would find out instantaneously in the middle of a movie, in the middle of a meeting, in the middle of your acting, versus there would wait till you get home or wait to your back, hey, look, there was a time when if you went on a steamship to Europe and you were gone for two months, maybe you'd get letters that would be three weeks later, but you wouldn't know anything that happened until you got back from Europe. But people have the like audacity, and I'm guilty of this as well, to be like, if I'm calling my husband, he doesn't pick up, and I call him again, I'm like, why didn't you pick up?

Like, I don't even leave any room for the notion that he might be busy, right? Right. I'm like, no, no, no. And what my brother said at best once, he was like, listen, he's like, I'm going to hang on to this, you know, this train of thought for as long as I can, which is the cell phone is for my convenience, not for your convenience to me. It is so that I can do what I need to do, not so that you have access to me all the time. That is hard, especially now that he's a father and a husband and all the things, but I liked that. I like trying to have a healthy relationship with it.

It's nearly impossible now. Yes, and I think that's a good philosophical way to end. Before we go, Tony, what would you like us to know about any projects? Is this the last season of your show? Did Lisa tell me that? This is the last season, and I love your wife so much. By the bye. But yes, this is the last season. Of SEAL team. Of SEAL team on Paramount Plus with COVID and all the shenanigans in between actor strikes and writer strikes. It's been eight years and seven seasons and 114 episodes, something like that. So it's, I am actively trying to figure out what is next. So I'll keep you updated. But I have to tell you my favorite outgoing message that I ever heard.

Okay. Please. I called a, my, the first TV show I ever did was this guy named Leonard Drake. And I called him. He was staying with his mother in New York. And he was like, just call me in my mother's house. And she had a landline and her answering machine. When I called, the ender machine was her thick New York accent.

And she said, hello, you've reached Dolores. But the timing was all wrong. And that was it. And that was it. That is a good one. I love it so much. That's great. Tony, socials or website to look up whatever it is you end up doing next?

Totally. I'm at Tony Trucks on across the board. And if you are watching this, on YouTube or listening to this on a podcast. Whatever, however you're hearing my words right now, like and subscribe, as they say, or follow on Spotify or what have you. These 90s history on all of the socials. Tony, thank you so much for doing this. I love you. You're a great friend. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you asked me. I'll come back for anything you want to talk about. Okay. I think we can find some other things that you might have. I'm unemployed. Can you see?

Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Well, as I always end this, until then, Holmes, smell you later.