Restoration of the dial telephone Fe-TAp-791-1 of the Deutsche Bundespost 1985

[Volker]

Restoration of the dial telephone Fe-TAp-791-1 of the Deutsche Bundespost 1985

The phone was completely disassembled, cleaned inside and out. The contacts of the dial mechanism were cleaned and readjusted. The case made of ABS was polished to a high gloss.


The construction was very sturdy and is easy to disassemble for repair. This phone, by the way, was my first phone in my own home and was a mass-produced phone. However, it was in green. You could not buy it at that time. You could only rent it from the Deutsche Bundespost. The sound quality is excellent. By the way, it was still a dial phone, because many customers did not want to get used to the push button phones. These could only pulse dial at that time.

[TelePlay]

I really like the way you completely "shine" up the interior and restore the internal to as close to manufactured as possible. Great attention to details with no short cuts.

[countryman]

I'm not sure the customers really preferred the rotary dial. They just accepted it because they were used to it. I seem to recall the Bundespost had digitalization in mind already in the late 1970ies - the highly modern ISDN standard that was pushed so hard from the mid 80ies well into the 2000 years. The rotary 79x series should only fill the gap at minimum cost. The Bundespost wanted to avoid a rush into analog push button phones (pulse or touch tone) before ISDN capable exchanges were established.
In the end, private subscribers never saw much extra value in ISDN and for internet access it wasn't much faster than analog modems, time went away over it.
Good for collectors, many VOIP routers still offer an ISDN standard connector and private branch exchanges with ISDN in / analog out ports are available used at very affordable cost.

[Volker]

Yes, if I remember correctly, in West Germany in the mid-1980s, the key pad cost an extra 4 DM per month. This corresponds to 5 dollars in today's purchasing power. The purpose behind this was to prevent too many customers from demanding new phones with keypads all at once. Yes, and that's why there was this modern-looking telephone that still had a dial, so that customers wouldn't gain any advantage by exchanging it. 

The keypad did not have a practical advantage and time saving for most private customers. Numbers could usually not yet be stored. The numbers were known by heart. Telephone charges were high. People rarely made phone calls. Mostly, they were local calls with short numbers. A keyboard was perhaps a status symbol for the private customer. Keyboards were by no means a given in the 1980s. I still had a mechanical typewriter at the time, and I was the proud owner of a calculator that cost a lot of money. Something similar to smartphones only existed in science fiction movies like Star Trek.

In any case, I like to make phone calls with this old device. Initiating a conversation by dialing numbers on the dial gives every phone call a special feeling that it is a "real" phone call.