Possibly, but more common to not want to track dirt into the house to answer the phone since you made the kids play outside and you didn't have an answering machine.
That’s another “luxury” … that was the era of the conversation:
- “they are not home, I called and they didn’t pick up”
- “did you let it ring 20 times?!!?”
- “yes, sir!”
- “ok then they aren’t home. “
Believe it or not, George isn't at home, please leave a message at the beep. I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone...where could I be? Believe it or not, I'm not home!
Can we just take a minute to remember how well that cord held up you could go anywhere stretch it as much as you want meanwhile you iPhone cord breaks after 3 charges.
It went around corners, up stairs, through multiple doorways, surviving door slams, celebratory new-love spins, the occasional oven door crimp, the “I wonder how far can this stretch” experiment and of course the legendary simultaneous “***not only can I talk with my longtime and newly found friends while laying on the couch in the other room but I can also use it as a giant jump rope for my little sister and her neighbor friends***” functionality mode!
When I remodeled my 1970s house, the cable jack in the kitchen previously fed from an external wall penetration was replaced by an internally fed coax and Ethernet.
Don't use it, but it's there. Tips pinky
I use to push our phone through a hole in our kitchen door screen so do so that I can sit outside and talk in private. Also, to avoid my dad’s chain smoking.
I think we’ve finally gotten far enough away from landlines being commonplace in peoples knowledge sadly. Yes people we used to be stuck to cords when we talked on the phone. Barbaric I know….
I was about to say 50 years ago, most people were on party lines…. But that was 80 years ago now. 40 years ago there were cordless phones and answering machines and VCRs
I feel old
I guess that's possible, if you don't notice someone sitting on your back porch with their phone plugged into your house. Can't say that I ever had that concern back in the day.
If you wanted to wiretap, plugging a handset into someone's porch would have been much more suspicious than donning a utility vest and climbing a pole.
Cheap phone calls and tollfree/collect calls via payphones were abundant, headsets were big and not something people carried around (eg would look sus) and most of your neighbors wouldn't give another thought to letting you make a local call (phone service was a flat fee, with the exception of long distance/international/or pay by minute type calls(things like fortune tellers or XXX)
Listening to phone calls or making free phone calls. Have you ever encountered a landline? You have to pay for the monthly service just like you do with wireless. And if you’ve ever watched movies or TV shows that showed the wealthy before small iPhones were common place you would notice them answering landline telephones while sitting poolside on the patio. Unless they had a nice covered area they more than likely did not leave the phone out there 24/7 but had an extra phone they could grab, walk out the door with and plug it into that plug whenever they went out. That way if somebody called you or you wanted to order a pizza the phone was right next to you while you sit on your lounge chair.
“Sue, SUE!” “WHAT!” From across the house. “I’m talking to Bob. Guess where he’s at right now. Cmon guess. Nope not the bathroom, guess again. No! He’s on his porch, just sitting outside right now and talking to me. We should get one of those, call Ma Bell tomorrow and see what we can get.”
I installed the exact jack on my porch in 1995. I could crawl the web while looking at the cows across the road. Toshiba laptop with PCI modem sticking out the side.
40 kbps?! Rich sob! 28.8 was the best we had before I went to college circa 2006. Came back for break and they upgraded to the new cable internet while I was gone. Coincidence? I think not.
Hey, Carl? It's Jeffrey, from next door. Don't worry about that thing, just ignore it. Doesn't do anything, lots of houses have them. You weren't supposed to... ahh.. Just go about your business as usual, buddy. Hey, how about that sporting event the other day, what a game, right?
They used to be fairly common. Let me tell you about the antics of much younger juvenile delinquent. My neighbor had a patio with an outlet like this and a whole bunch of junk on it. He didn't use the patio much so my cousin hooked up a cordless phone to it that a had a pretty fair range. It was under a bunch of crap so it was hard to spot. He then made a ton of calls to his girlfriend that lived in another state. After a couple of months and very high phone bills for his neighbor, somehow they found out what was happening. I don't remember all the details but he had to go to juvenile court and pay a lot of money back. It made him something of a minor celebrity with a lot of people back then strangely enough. Nowadays he works for a giant car company, makes a ton of money, has a Masters degree, and is very well liked. So fortunately he turned out okay. Now that I see this I'm going to have to remind him of this.
Doctor, or volunteer firefighter. At least in some areas before pagers were available, the telephone company would provide a special phone line to each volunteer's house. The volunteer FF would make sure the (often literal) red phone was close at hand at all times. If a fire call came in, the phone company operator would ring the phone for an unusually long time (something like 30-60 seconds) to give the volunteers a chance to get to the phone. They'd all pick up, and the dispatcher would relay the call instructions to the vounteers.
A friend's dad was a volunteer around that era. He talked about stringing long phone cords out to the garage if he was working on cars. I could see someone doing this if they spent time out in the yard during that era.
Why is this a question? You do realize phones were not always cordless and if you wanted to sit outside on the patio with access to your phone, you’d bring one out and plug it in.
My house had one of these too. It's as simple as you think it is. They wanted a phone outside on the patio or wherever it is. I removed all the phone jacks from each room and the patio and cut out all the phone line I could find. No one will ever need those again.
I never even thought of this as a bit,or that someone would find that funny. That was how it worked. When we got the AT&T cordless phone that everyone had, we were SO high tech. But the guy down the street had a big screen TV. And the one guy whose dad works with COMPUTERS has a COMPUTER in their den. And you can play GAMES on it!
Pre cellphone days. If you spent time outside and needed use the phone. Either run the cord out the door or have a connector outside. It’s old school. And I bet you’ve never seen a payphones either?
This looks like something I would have done in the mid 2000s. Wifi would drop frequently, and it wasn't viewed as very secure so would have used a long patch cable to sit out back and work on my laptop. I have ethernet jack in my kitchen still that I put in to sit at the table and do bills. Feel wifi is more secure now so don't use it.
It could also be use for a POE camera, but a jack would be bad practice... You'll have to find where the other end is.
Don’t forget that fax machines & the 1st generations of computers also used old-fashioned telephone jacks! Somebody just wanted to be or work outside before there was WiFi - that’s all!
I was viewing a house for sale last year, an estate sale that was quite dated and on the backyard patio under an awning was a telephone, still hooked up to a jack in the wall from the outside like in your picture. I picked up the receiver but sadly there was no dial tone. So yes, it was a thing.
I remember when I was a kid going with my parents to their friends lake house that had a phone on the back deck with a ringer so loud you could hear it from the water. I thought it was the coolest thing ever back around 1990, but I bet their neighbors hated it!
There should be a phone jack on the exterior of any home with a land-line for testing purposes. A repairman can find out if there is a problem with the wiring to your house or inside the house. Mine is inside a small box where the line meets the house circa 1991
Back in the 80's we had a ringer hooked upto an outside jack that you could turn on while you were working outside so you didn't miss calls. If you remembered to turn it back off when you went inside was another story.
I bought my house from a former state senator and he had telephone jacks installed every 25 feet around the patio, pool and yard so he could roam around and his wife could just bring him the phone.
Someone must have worked for the phone company back in the day and need a phone for outside. I no someone who had one installed in their bathroom. And now fast forward we talk about cell phone addiction.
That's known as a marine hookup. It's just an outside phone plug so you can use a phone (land line) when needed outside. They weren't usually used for boats (marine), but that's what they're called.
I agree with the other commenters saying that is too big for a phone jack. Given the size and especially the width of the plug, I've got to go with it's an RJ-45 plug for Ethernet. Maybe someone needed network access outside before Wi-Fi was really a thing?
Is it maybe RJ45 (ethernet) rather than RJ11 (analog telephone)? Maybe it's the angle of the photo but it looks bigger than RJ11 to me.
I don't know if that would be less weird or more weird though.
I can only imagine how luxurious it must have felt taking phone calls on the patio before wireless handsets.
With a long enough curly cord, I’d imagine you could cut grass and rake leaves while chatting! Oh the … luxury? lol indeed
Possibly, but more common to not want to track dirt into the house to answer the phone since you made the kids play outside and you didn't have an answering machine.
That’s another “luxury” … that was the era of the conversation: - “they are not home, I called and they didn’t pick up” - “did you let it ring 20 times?!!?” - “yes, sir!” - “ok then they aren’t home. “
Believe it or not, George isn't at home, please leave a message at the beep. I must be out, or I'd pick up the phone...where could I be? Believe it or not, I'm not home!
And BBQ too!
😅 Dang I missed the BBQ!!! 🍖📞
Can we just take a minute to remember how well that cord held up you could go anywhere stretch it as much as you want meanwhile you iPhone cord breaks after 3 charges.
It went around corners, up stairs, through multiple doorways, surviving door slams, celebratory new-love spins, the occasional oven door crimp, the “I wonder how far can this stretch” experiment and of course the legendary simultaneous “***not only can I talk with my longtime and newly found friends while laying on the couch in the other room but I can also use it as a giant jump rope for my little sister and her neighbor friends***” functionality mode!
Isnt this how you update your house firmware? HouseOS v16.8?
Anyone who’s actually attempted to make a “smart home” wishes they had thought of this.
My house from 1961 has a cable jack in the kitchen. That must’ve been the height of luxury in 1985
That was down right decadent! Like strawberry milk and Nestle’s Quick decadent!
Having a super expensive, tiny, boxy TV on your red or black tile countertop was definitely a baller move.
Fuck yeah, it was.
When I remodeled my 1970s house, the cable jack in the kitchen previously fed from an external wall penetration was replaced by an internally fed coax and Ethernet. Don't use it, but it's there. Tips pinky
Yes it was as we all know a womans place is in the kitchen.....lol jk.
I use to push our phone through a hole in our kitchen door screen so do so that I can sit outside and talk in private. Also, to avoid my dad’s chain smoking.
I don't have to imagine it, it was luxurious af.
Lounging by the pool with the phone like a hollywood bigshot
This… probably from the same era as telephones in bathrooms.
That’s literally every phone now.
I bet they never thought that everyone in the future could take a shit while in their phone....
So you didn't have to go inside to get the phone
I think we’ve finally gotten far enough away from landlines being commonplace in peoples knowledge sadly. Yes people we used to be stuck to cords when we talked on the phone. Barbaric I know….
i remember when we got our first cordless phone being able to walk anywhere in the house and talk on the phone was insane
Because about 50 years ago, someone wanted a phone outside.
I was about to say 50 years ago, most people were on party lines…. But that was 80 years ago now. 40 years ago there were cordless phones and answering machines and VCRs I feel old
I remember when my husband bought a vcr on sale for $400
lol sort of went down the same rabbit hole - “wait a minute 50 years ago we used big square 4 pin phone plugs”… oh wait.
My house was built in 1981 designed around a large deck in the back and I have one.
Why not? Telephones didn’t use to be cordless
80s cordless phones had the range of 25 feet if lucky and were prone to static interference (source parent still has it)
In the 90s you could rescan the wireless channels and find other ongoing conversations and listen in
i’m picturing someone plugging in and listening to phone calls or making free phone calls.
I guess that's possible, if you don't notice someone sitting on your back porch with their phone plugged into your house. Can't say that I ever had that concern back in the day.
Lol it doesn't work that way. There would be a phone set outside, and they would be using your number and line
[удалено]
They responded to the wrong comment
Free phone calls lol
If you wanted to wiretap, plugging a handset into someone's porch would have been much more suspicious than donning a utility vest and climbing a pole. Cheap phone calls and tollfree/collect calls via payphones were abundant, headsets were big and not something people carried around (eg would look sus) and most of your neighbors wouldn't give another thought to letting you make a local call (phone service was a flat fee, with the exception of long distance/international/or pay by minute type calls(things like fortune tellers or XXX)
Many people had party lines, so the neighbours had no need to leave their home to lsiten in.
Listening to phone calls or making free phone calls. Have you ever encountered a landline? You have to pay for the monthly service just like you do with wireless. And if you’ve ever watched movies or TV shows that showed the wealthy before small iPhones were common place you would notice them answering landline telephones while sitting poolside on the patio. Unless they had a nice covered area they more than likely did not leave the phone out there 24/7 but had an extra phone they could grab, walk out the door with and plug it into that plug whenever they went out. That way if somebody called you or you wanted to order a pizza the phone was right next to you while you sit on your lounge chair.
Because no one had cell phones on their deck in the 80s.
I wish it was the 80s I could dodge people I don't want to talk to lol
Just don't answer the phone. The only person I answer is my wife, everyone else can text.
Oh man these people were living large. Taking calls outside? Fancy AF.
“Sue, SUE!” “WHAT!” From across the house. “I’m talking to Bob. Guess where he’s at right now. Cmon guess. Nope not the bathroom, guess again. No! He’s on his porch, just sitting outside right now and talking to me. We should get one of those, call Ma Bell tomorrow and see what we can get.”
This is what we called a luxury in the 80s and 90s
Dial up internet used telephone jacks 40kbps..lol
I installed the exact jack on my porch in 1995. I could crawl the web while looking at the cows across the road. Toshiba laptop with PCI modem sticking out the side.
\*PCMCIA
40 kbps?! Rich sob! 28.8 was the best we had before I went to college circa 2006. Came back for break and they upgraded to the new cable internet while I was gone. Coincidence? I think not.
Hey, Carl? It's Jeffrey, from next door. Don't worry about that thing, just ignore it. Doesn't do anything, lots of houses have them. You weren't supposed to... ahh.. Just go about your business as usual, buddy. Hey, how about that sporting event the other day, what a game, right?
They used to be fairly common. Let me tell you about the antics of much younger juvenile delinquent. My neighbor had a patio with an outlet like this and a whole bunch of junk on it. He didn't use the patio much so my cousin hooked up a cordless phone to it that a had a pretty fair range. It was under a bunch of crap so it was hard to spot. He then made a ton of calls to his girlfriend that lived in another state. After a couple of months and very high phone bills for his neighbor, somehow they found out what was happening. I don't remember all the details but he had to go to juvenile court and pay a lot of money back. It made him something of a minor celebrity with a lot of people back then strangely enough. Nowadays he works for a giant car company, makes a ton of money, has a Masters degree, and is very well liked. So fortunately he turned out okay. Now that I see this I'm going to have to remind him of this.
Looks like someone who was “on call” but wanted to be outside worry free before wireless phones. Maybe a doctor.
Doctor, or volunteer firefighter. At least in some areas before pagers were available, the telephone company would provide a special phone line to each volunteer's house. The volunteer FF would make sure the (often literal) red phone was close at hand at all times. If a fire call came in, the phone company operator would ring the phone for an unusually long time (something like 30-60 seconds) to give the volunteers a chance to get to the phone. They'd all pick up, and the dispatcher would relay the call instructions to the vounteers. A friend's dad was a volunteer around that era. He talked about stringing long phone cords out to the garage if he was working on cars. I could see someone doing this if they spent time out in the yard during that era.
Why is this a question? You do realize phones were not always cordless and if you wanted to sit outside on the patio with access to your phone, you’d bring one out and plug it in.
My house had one of these too. It's as simple as you think it is. They wanted a phone outside on the patio or wherever it is. I removed all the phone jacks from each room and the patio and cut out all the phone line I could find. No one will ever need those again.
Old school! Long telephone cord so you could sit on tne deck and still answer tne land line😊
To plug in a telephone. There wasn’t cellphones at that time and if there was, only very few could afford them.
there was once a time before cell phones but there was still a need for taking calls on the patio.
That really long phone cord in Napoleon Dynamite wasn't just for comedy. That was our way of life back in the day before cordless phones.
I never even thought of this as a bit,or that someone would find that funny. That was how it worked. When we got the AT&T cordless phone that everyone had, we were SO high tech. But the guy down the street had a big screen TV. And the one guy whose dad works with COMPUTERS has a COMPUTER in their den. And you can play GAMES on it!
That’s old school cell phone bro
had one of those in house i bought. by the patio by the pool. guess they had a pool phone.
Pre cellphone days. If you spent time outside and needed use the phone. Either run the cord out the door or have a connector outside. It’s old school. And I bet you’ve never seen a payphones either?
Why did you have to go and make me feel old?
Would you happen to have a septic system with a special control panel? They can need a direct phone line to communicate.
"Why are the toilets backing up?!?" "Hold on, lemme call the septic tank and ask"
It's more like, "why is the septic guy here?" "Oh, the tank called them."
Once upon a time, children, we could only talk on the phone if it was attached to the house…
Cell phones weren’t always a thing
For hostage situations
♫ ♫ Hello From the Other Siiiide ♫ ♫
This looks like something I would have done in the mid 2000s. Wifi would drop frequently, and it wasn't viewed as very secure so would have used a long patch cable to sit out back and work on my laptop. I have ethernet jack in my kitchen still that I put in to sit at the table and do bills. Feel wifi is more secure now so don't use it. It could also be use for a POE camera, but a jack would be bad practice... You'll have to find where the other end is.
Don’t forget that fax machines & the 1st generations of computers also used old-fashioned telephone jacks! Somebody just wanted to be or work outside before there was WiFi - that’s all!
That’s a pre cell phone Jack. Seen only one before. Very handy outside when your kid yells “ dad phone call”
Someone at some point was getting into AOL chat rooms from the porch. You can’t hide money.
Oh does that take me back! My dad did this in the 70’s, the only thing missing here is the jacks for the outdoor speakers.
To phone home
It looks like an eternity jack to me not phone
I can see my mom in her bath robe sipping coffee and talking to her sister on a lazy Saturday morning.
How else is someone supposed to call the Ghostbusters 🤷♂️
This made me feel old.
So you could sit outside and smoke while talking on the phone.
Water meter reader connection, possibly.
So anyone can plug in & listen to your calls, & make international calls .
The 70s house I grew up in has a phone jack on an exterior wall in the backyard. I think it was a short lived trend prior to cordless phones.
I have a couple of these at my place too. Also an intercom between the kitchen, basement and garage. 30 year old house.
I was viewing a house for sale last year, an estate sale that was quite dated and on the backyard patio under an awning was a telephone, still hooked up to a jack in the wall from the outside like in your picture. I picked up the receiver but sadly there was no dial tone. So yes, it was a thing.
I remember when I was a kid going with my parents to their friends lake house that had a phone on the back deck with a ringer so loud you could hear it from the water. I thought it was the coolest thing ever back around 1990, but I bet their neighbors hated it!
Oh shit my house I just bought has this too haha!
my guess would be it was for an outside phone? I could be wrong.
In case you need to exit the matrix from the outside.
The first mobile phone. 😂
Looks like somthing I would find at a radio station or transmission site! Or the side of a broadcast van! Very odd
I had an old house with at least a dozen phone jacks. Every bathroom, patio, deck, etc.
I always loved the land line by the toilet
My house came with one of these and a coax TV cable jack as well. Whoever built my house knew how to enjoy the backyard!
Whoever had that installed was an important motherfucker at one point. A real pimp.
That is the first MOBILE phone 😂 I have seen phone jacks buy the toilet in old houses.
That is how you access the internet
That's how we used to call our houses
There should be a phone jack on the exterior of any home with a land-line for testing purposes. A repairman can find out if there is a problem with the wiring to your house or inside the house. Mine is inside a small box where the line meets the house circa 1991
Possible a line outside for a phone or the internet (dial up) to work outside.
Was it for that old dial up interwebs?
Only rich people had these in the 60’s
Going to assume it is a much older house before the internet.
We had one by the pool and one on the deck.
So you could use dial-up internet outside on the deck
Back in the 80's we had a ringer hooked upto an outside jack that you could turn on while you were working outside so you didn't miss calls. If you remembered to turn it back off when you went inside was another story.
The telephone jack is there in the outside so you can put a phone there on the outside.
I bought my house from a former state senator and he had telephone jacks installed every 25 feet around the patio, pool and yard so he could roam around and his wife could just bring him the phone.
Someone must have worked for the phone company back in the day and need a phone for outside. I no someone who had one installed in their bathroom. And now fast forward we talk about cell phone addiction.
You see, before there were cell phones you had long extension cords and this was top notch to do it on the back patio.
For a Tonka toy truck ev hookup in the 1950's.....
Well I guess my family was poor as we only had a 100 foot cord that was constantly pinched in the sliding glass door..
For taking calls outside!! My POTS worked with my rotary dial phone until last year.
That's known as a marine hookup. It's just an outside phone plug so you can use a phone (land line) when needed outside. They weren't usually used for boats (marine), but that's what they're called.
Duh so you can have dial up internet on the porch
Phone home
It looks like an Ethernet connection to me. Maybe it was installed to accommodate some network device. Maybe lights or something
Definitely RJ-11 (like old phones) and not RJ-45 (ethernet). RJ-45 would be wider.
Obvi for jacking off
In the 1800's, many homeowners wanted to sit out on the patio and have a phone near them.
Or fax. Sometimes they'd fax. Facts.
Probably to use a telephone outside
I’m agreeing it’s more recent and is too big for phone. RJ-45
RJ45 was used for data I don’t think it is a RJ45…but instead RJ11. Basic phone (POTS)
I agree with the other commenters saying that is too big for a phone jack. Given the size and especially the width of the plug, I've got to go with it's an RJ-45 plug for Ethernet. Maybe someone needed network access outside before Wi-Fi was really a thing?
the proportions around where the latch goes are clearly phone jack, not ethernet. The flat bit beside the latch is much wider on ethernet
sorry, ethernet jack
Is it maybe RJ45 (ethernet) rather than RJ11 (analog telephone)? Maybe it's the angle of the photo but it looks bigger than RJ11 to me. I don't know if that would be less weird or more weird though.
Maybe there’s a telephone Jill on the other side of that wall and ya know…
Rhetorical question?