I'm old enough to remember having an 8-party line with a 3-minute limit on each call...people would take turns calling each other just to be able to finish their conversation.
@Nimbus: I remember not having a house phone cause the phone company hadn't gotten the farms wired up for phones...we had to drive two miles to use the phone at the general store in a small village. The phone looked like this:
No joke, and the phone system had a switchboard and operator and when you wanted to make a phone call you had to take the receiver off and tap the tap-hook thing and tell the operator the phone number.
