1337xxxxxxxxxlolololololololololxxxxxxxxx1337 Posted:

. . .

But I don’t know what you mean by “the phone companies owned the phones,” unless you’re talking about payphones.

Up until some time in the 70s, there was only one “phone company” (in the U.S.) and you could only get phones from them, which you had to pay monthly for. We had a broken one lying in our basement for years that a repairman left behind that we weren’t sure what to do with (you had to call a repairman if your phone stopped working) . It said “Property of Bell Telephone” or something like that on the bottom.