At the time my family and I moved to Billtown (1983), we had to rent our phone unit from AT&T. They had an office around where the ACME Ribs place on Market Street is (at one time, it was across the street, where the Brown Library parking lot is now), and we would pay about $1.95 every month. They advised us to rent, because, they said, if anything went wrong with it, they'd simply replace it. (My friends had a hard time convincing me that the chances anything would go wrong with it were very low indeed!)
Then, K-Mart began to sell phones, so we could own our phone, and get a colored one! (Sears also sold phones, as well as Radio Shack.) We could get some pretty fancy phones, including ones with answering machines, and clock radios (which would automatically mute when a call came in).
I only got inspired to make this post because Katie brought home a jigsaw puzzle from Goodwill, a poster of pretty phone units from Eastern Europe. They look pretty much like the colored phone sets from around 1985.
Soon after, we could get extension sets we could put all over the house; but they were all connected to a single main unit. Around this time, too, AT&T started putting in DIY phone plugs in the wall; we'd buy our phone unit, and plug it into the wall. If your house still had the old time wires hanging out of the wall, they'd sell you a modernization kit that could convert the hard-wired setup into a receptacle for a phone plug.
It was around 2000 that smart phones arrived, and you know the test!
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