Presumably this was before divesture and the phone company still owned the telephone unit?
Before divesture there were a fair amount of older phones still in service that required separate bell boxes. All candle stick and 202 ("French") telephone sets did. The 302 set (1938) was a technical advance in that no separate bell box was required. Many 202 sets still in service were modernized with an "F" (300 series) handset replacing the older one, and candle sticks got "F" transmitter and receivers; so this equipment all remained in service and was very common in the 1950s and 1960s. The Space Saver was very popular on workbenches, and even advertised for the home.
Anyway, before divesture I'm surprised the phoneco had trouble working with a phone that required a bell box. Sure they were rare by the
1980s, but not so rare.Steven Lichter wrote:
That was a reason -- quite legitimate -- that the phone companies (both Bell and indepedents) fought customer owned equipment, especially without protective devices. If a lot of customers had this sort of thing it would add up to a lot of service calls for the phone company, and for them considerable extra expense and aggrvation without benefit. The pre-divesture Bell System physical plant was engineered for low maintenance to minimize service calls. Customer owned equipment likely wouldn't have such high quality and be more likely to fail. The result is service calls and finger pointing.
The phone company correctly realized new customer telephone sets would be cheap junk and cause false busies, shorts, and bad connections all of which were heresy to the service standards principles of the old Bell System.
Once customer owned equipment was clearly here to stay, the phone companies did a 180 degree reversal, and ceased end-to-end responsibility for service. So now if you have a telephone problem, the phone company does nothing until you are absolutely sure it is not a problem in your wiring or your telephone sets; if it is, they will charge you and charge you dearly to fix it. And of course now we have fingerpointing over which side of the demarc the problem is on.
The phone company added more protection in the local loop and C.O. for this sort of thing and of course we customers add to pay for it in our bills.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Everytime I get a piece of junk mail from Southwestern Bell, err, SBC, err AT&T offering some new promotion or another ("take it all for six months or a year for ten dollars per month", etc) one thing they _always_ insist has to be included in the 'deal' is Wire and Line Protection/Repair Service; they always clearly indicate this is _not_ optional. PAT]