Perusing ebay for parts 746 phones, I happened upon this oddity, a seemingly regular GPO 746 in Ivory, but the dial has something different, a "Dial Clock", which appears to be a simple digital clock (presumably based on the cheap digital watches you could pick up in the 80s for like 20p!) fitted into a housing that sits in the dial in place of the number card... ;D
I've no interest in the phone, I just wanted to point this little oddity out... ;D
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/293071816066
This looks like a normal clock. It would be interesting if the battery can be replaced?
Here in Germany, the Deutsche Bundespost introduced an eight minute interval billing for local calls in the eighties. Exceeding the time by 1 second would cost another 23 Pfennig. Millions of 8-minute-sandclocks and other devices were produced in that time. My first thought was it could be a timer of a similar kind, but this does not seem to be the case.
Thanks for showing this oddity!
If it's like the old digital watches of the 80s, it's probably not even got a timer, they usually just had time, day & seconds usually, but if someone here buys it, they can investigate it, assuming it's possible to revive it... :)
That's an interesting looking thing. I can't decide if it replaces the dial opal or if it's stuck on the top.I imagine BT wouldn't have been too keen on people messing with their phones and taking the opal out, so I bet it fits on the top.
The question is... what's it for? Is it just a clock, or is there a call timer built in? I remember something called a 'Monitel' that was a mains powered devive with a display that sat under a 746 and had both a clock and an indication of how much a call was costing. When the rates changed they sent out a new punched card, which you slid into the device to reprogramme it. The thing was huge though, which makes me think this is just a clock.
I think it's just a digital clock rather than something like the Monitel, probably just some gimmicky item for someone to be a bit smug about having a digital clock on their phone ('til the BT Sceptre came out!!)... :)