I recently got a new computer and I am moving my archives to the new one. I was scanning through the old telecom postings and saw this from November 15, 1992:
"According to a UPI story, Ohio Bell has announced plans to cripple some pay phones in Cleveland. They have already started converting pay phones from tone dial to rotary, and restricting them to outgoing calls only. Now they will also be disallowing coin calls (credit card and collect will still be allowed) at certain hours of the day, and disabling the tone pad after dialing on those phones that still have tone dials. They claim that this will limit the use of pay phones for illegal purposes."
Something I long noticed but never asked about was the situation with Texas pay phones. I lived in the state from 1986-1987 and 1998 to present. I lived/visited areas with GTE (and successors), Southwestern Bell (and successors), and third party pay phones. None of them accepted incoming calls. I found this strange as pay phones in other states I had lived in accepted calls.
According to this page:
Further searching doesn't reveal anything. I'm guessing with pay phones being so passé this just doesn't come up. I'm curious if anyone here knows the story of Texas pay phones and why they didn't like incoming calls.
If you're ever bored or nostalgic it's worth a visit to the archives to see just how far we've come (or how bad we've gotten depending on your perspective).