Here's the first phone I remember using.
No screens, no icons, no battery to recharge, no worries about memory or getting a signal.
It just hung there on the wall. We were on a party line with four or five other families. Our ring was one long and three shorts. In order to call someone else on the party line you just turned the crank and rang their code.
To go "outside" the party line you gave one long crank and waited until a woman got on the line and said, "Number please." You give her the number and back at the telephone office she'd stick in patch cord plugs on the big board in front of her. (Watch some old movies. It was a favorite scene they liked to plug in.)
With the lines patched in, the operator would then ring the other phone and you'd wait for them to answer. So simple, and you didn't need a fifth grader to show you how to do it. But as illustrated, you had to be careful not to get tangled in the cord...or talk during a thunderstorm, as a bolt of lightning could come through the phone if the line got struck.
It was nice to be smarter than your phone back then. Then we got dial phones and the operator was eliminated except for long distance, until they invented area codes. It was all downhill from there.
