Anyone ever see one of these? Rotary & Push button Automatic Electric

[Godfather367]

Hi all,
  Has anyone ever seen one of these? I can't imagine why one would need both rotary and touch tone. I'm thinking of bidding on it, just because it's different! lol.  Is this price too much?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121662880750

[Jack Ryan]

That is an AE 890 Data Retrieval Subset. It appears in catalogue TA-75.

Jack

[poplar1]

It could be used where a central office or PBX accepted only rotary dial pulses. You would make a call in the "usual manner" with the rotary dial, then use the pushbutton dial to enter account numbers, etc.

The Bell System used 1035 type dials mounted separately for the same purpose, called "end-to-end signaling." In 1970, the step-by-step 701 PBX at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta had 1035 dials added to many of the rotary phones (but the 211s and 302s had to go).

[stub]

Godfather367,
                    Go here and checkout mine -  http://tinyurl.com/o6wy2tx       Cheaper than mine was..  AE Cat. 1973 and 1975.

Left click on pic 2 times and after that, left click one more time to enlarge  .  Nice phone!!! Good luck on bidding!!!  stub

[paul-f]

As stub mentioned, there's a topic on these including a detailed dial photo and photos of how they were boxed for shipping from the factory.

   http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=3239.msg43191#msg43191

Also, I went through a period of collecting AE set variations using the plastics from the 880 speakerphone.  Examples are shown here:

   http://www.paul-f.com/speakae.htm

Has anyone run into other examples?