Phones like this have been used for all sorts of things in Canada. 30-40 years ago some hospitals had these in the lobby and when picked up they just automatically connected to a cab company for people needing a taxi. I have also seen them in a couple houses where a small town volunteer fire chief lived and they just made a direct connection to the fire hall, somewhat like an intercom but using the telephone company’s switching equipment to make the connection between places.
How would this be preferable to having one with buttons and just not using the buttons? You could maybe argue that it would be marginally less wasteful of resources, but I’d have thought that the overhead of manufacturing an entirely new type of phone would outweigh any savings on time/energy/costs.
In early days of telephones, first, not many people had them. Second, the switches that allowed pulse or touch tone dialing were very expensive and were difficult to put together. The USSR threw people at problems instead of developing complicated computers to do things.
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u/InsouciantSlavDude 6d ago
It served as a reciever phone. You could only take calls, was used in administration and probably military.