Talk:2272: Ringtone Timeline

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Doing the Title Text. “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 18:07, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

What about the era of "I would love to set my phone to a traditional ringing sound but this weird space garbage is the closest my phone will get"? 173.245.54.61 18:53, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

What kind of phone is this? circa 2000s flip phone? 162.158.214.82 08:52, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I've got my smartphone set to the classic monophoncic Nokia 3310 tune. You can easily tell the >25y from the <25y generation apart from their reaction. -- //gir.st/ (talk) 19:22, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if Randal actually found some data to support his timeline or if it's more of a general observation made by him. In my subjective experience, the trend towards having the phone on vibrate all the time has been going on since at least 2017-2018 rather than the future/present time indicated in his timeline. Bischoff (talk) 19:41, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

And I've not even noticed the change. I still hear ringtones going off when people get calls. I'm not even sure how it would work, since surely you'd at least need it to ring while charging or when you don't have pockets (like a lot of dressier women's clothing). And then there's the trend I have noticed of people actually playing their music out loud without headphones, which makes me think that people are not becoming more concerned about their phones making noise. Trlkly (talk) 10:35, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Early ringers were hand-cranked generators (or perhaps magnetos), so you might be able to tell who was calling by how fast they cranked.172.68.206.22 19:51, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

No, in that period it was mostly still operators. I suppose you would know which operator was on duty, if your area was small enough. SDSpivey (talk) 22:07, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Party lines shared the signal and differentiated the callee by ring. I grew up on 19-ring-12, i.e. line 19 (on the manual switchboard in the village) ringing one long and two short. There was a magneto, but you used it to request the operator to give you a line for an outgoing call; it signaled the switchboard, not another party.

I remember around 1982 staying over at a friend's house and hearing the electronic tweedling of their new landline phone and not knowing what it was. Prior to that all the phones I'd heard at homes, businesses, school, etc. were all normal ringers. So the cool space beeps starting around 1996 seems skewed to the right by about a decade. 172.68.38.124 20:21, 24 February 2020 (UTC)Pat

There's obviously plenty of overlap, and I think the boxes represent when a particular style was prevalent, not the entire duration. Barmar (talk) 20:37, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
In the UK, the so-called trimphone was introduced in the sixties with a warbling ringtone instead of the traditional bell sound. 162.158.159.12 23:12, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
The initial tones for tweedling or beeping phones were often pure sine wave tones, which are difficult for the human ear to locate. If you had five phones (not uncommon in some offices) you would need to pick up each in succession to find the one that was ringing. Snezzy (talk) 10:07, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Interesting contrast to xkcd 479. LHN

I would like to point out that "a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface" may not have been receiving a call at the time of the audio recording so technically Randall's ringtone could be utter silence (or a very low coil whine). 172.68.226.46 00:56, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I can't stand people who use the old fashioned 1950s bell ringtone. It's not cute anymore, it's just boring and overused. Almost as bad as the many "default" ringtones that people are too lazy to change. These are smartphones! You can easily use just about any song or sound imaginable! 162.158.214.82 08:52, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I will definitely not switch to vibration any time soon. I hate vibration in phones so much that I have installed multiple apps and mods to get rid of every single variant of vibration on my phone (which is surprisingly difficult), at least as long as the system is running. After shutdown it sadly still vibrates. Maybe I should screw off the vibration motor one day. Fabian42 (talk) 09:54, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

1820s to 1870s: whistle at end of long tube; (me, turn of the millenium: much abbreviated monophonic 'Composer' version of a complex polyphonic MIDI file of a classical tune I quite liked); Mid 23rdC: electronic version of a whistle through a long tube; Mid 24thC beeps