this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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As an old: You kids and your TeamSpeak .. back in my day Ventrilo, and we were happy to have it! (uphill both ways or something about my lawn).
You think that's old? Let's talk ICQ.
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.
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