Memories of a really goofy phone from the late 80s

Memories of a really goofy phone from the late 80s

I had this really bizarre telephone for some years in the 90s and 2000s. While mine is long gone now, I figured I'd talk about a little to establish that yes, this thing did exist, and to also hopefully inspire some Youtube types to find one and dissect it in a video.

It was called the FV 1000, dubbed a "Freedom Phone" model by Southwestern Bell, and it was a giant plastic piece of awful. It had certainly *sounded* cool when it was described in that electronics clearance catalog (Damark, maybe), but actually using the thing was another story entirely.

You see, it was supposed to be a "voice phone" ... as in voice-activated. While I got mine somewhere around 1990, I've been able to find evidence of it existing as far back as December 1987. So, imagine how mind-blowing that was back then: "wow! dialing the phone with my voice! In the 80s!".

Yeah well, Siri it was not.

Here's how it worked. It had no number buttons and no dial (you know, the spinny bit on a rotary phone). On the front, it just had some cursor keys (left, right, down, up) and a "store" button. The actual handset was unexpectedly lightweight and had a button at the top behind the earpiece. (I think there was also a reset button under a flip-up door, for what it's worth.)

Oh, and even more confusingly, you didn't get a dial tone when you picked it up. Picking it up off the very flimsy "hookswitch" presented you with a locally-generated tone that meant "okay, I'm waiting for you to talk to me now".

What you had to do was push the button down and say a command word like "DIAL", then wait for it to do the "ke-bwoop" confirmation noise and show "DIAL" on the single-line display. Then you'd read out the numbers one by one, waiting after each one for it to confirm. "1" *wait* "2" *wait* "0" *wait* "2" *wait* "4" *wait* "5" *wait* "6" ... you get the idea.

Then at the end, I think you just released the button and it would then "execute" the "command" you had just painstakingly built one word at a time. You'd hear the dial tone at last, and it would actually dial the number, and then it would connect things through and in theory you could talk like normal.

If this description is making you think "this thing sounds really slow", you'd be right. So, okay, naturally it had some memory features, right? Of course it did. You could store things like "Home 1" or "Neighbor 1" or "Office 1". Oh, and by the way, those names were immutable. You couldn't call it "Mrs. Brown" or "Mr. Chilman". It was "Neighbor 1" and "Neighbor 2" for you. Hope you remembered who was who! Enjoy flipping up that little door to see the labels you hand-wrote!

They did let you adjust the on-screen display for any given memory location, so while it might need to be TOLD "Neighbor 1", you could make it *display* "Mrs. Brown" or whatever... if it would fit.

It didn't always hear you correctly. When that happened, you had to say "BACKSPACE" and wait for it to acknowledge with another *ke-bwoop* noise. If you wanted to cancel, you had to be careful how you went about it, since letting go of the button would make it execute whatever you had told it so far.

In a stunning preview of today's event-driven half-assed GUI programs, you could actually get it out of sync with the "on hook" / "off hook" state that it maintained locally. I mentioned that it made that "I'm ready" tone when it's off the hook, right? Well, if you jostled it with just the right timing, you could manage to get it to be very much on the hook and yet still making the damn noise from the earpiece.

It wasn't super loud, but late at night when everything else was quiet, you could hear that tone coming from the phone as it was just waiting for you to push the button and give it some commands. The "fix" was to jostle it some more until it realized that you were not in fact trying to make it do something on your behalf.

One side note: for those thinking "this must have been amazing for people who can hear but can't see"... probably not so much. It didn't read back the numbers you told it to dial. So, if it mis-heard one digit as another, you'd never know. It only showed it on the display, so if you couldn't see it... oops.

Apparently the list price for this thing at the end of 1987 was $450... or about $1200 today. Imagine spending that much cash on some tech and then realizing it was annoying, flimsy, and generally unreliable.

Oh, wait, I guess we all do that pretty much constantly now. Never mind.