I bought my first answering machine in 1989 or 1990. It was a small black rectangle with a miniature cassette tape. It blinked red when it had messages. How I hated it, for the machine confirmed that very few people called me. Eventually, I switched to voicemail. Now I cringe when I see the blue light flashing at me, a light so bright and pulsing that I can see it through the frosted glass as I unlock the door. Fran Leibowitz was right: Adolescence is the last time you’ll ever be glad to hear the phone is for you. My adolescence lasted into my 30s, but so what.
Today, I was writing a scene set in 1983. The character has an answering machine. Possible? Probable? Who — that is, what type of person — had answering machines in 1983? What did they look like? How large were they? How cumbersome to use? Did they broadcast the incoming message into the world or muffle it?
I thought it fairly cheesy when Sex and the City was using the unintentionally unmuted answering machine well into the 21st century, just to provide a plot point. But I don’t want to be guilty of anachronism in the other direction, providing someone with technology he might not have. So if your answering machine memories lead me to a solution, so much the better.
(Oh, and did anyone resist the urge to be clever with the outgoing message on that first answering machine? I know I didn’t.)
Your memories after the beep.
Ah, yes, 1984. I remembering reading Orwell in school and thinking that date was sooooooo far away.
I have a friend who is a Luddite — I’ll ask him if he had an answering machine in 1983
We didn’t get our first answering machine until the late 80′s/early 90′s, but I definitely had to leave the really annoying outgoing message on it; you know the one where the tape records you saying hello and pretending you can’t hear the person calling, and they keep yelling hello, and then you so kindly let them know that you actually aren’t home and it was all a joke? Yeah, that was me. It lasted all of one week, I think, because every time my grandmother called she would get so upset I eventually had to take it off.
Bianca: People still do that and it drives me nuts. The messages I really hate:
Parents who let small children record the message.
People who preface the message with their current favorite song, especially if that song is a piece of unintelligble hip-hop.
The generic Stephen Hawking sounding “please leave a message” machine voice so you can’t tell if you got the number right.
Oh, and here’s a hint for call screeners: people who get a lot of messages, like attorneys, sit down with a handful of messages and return them one after the other. If they get your machine, they’re going to leave a message and move immediately on to the next call. Don’t be surprised if you pick up the phone and call back immediately, only to get told “he’s on the other line.”
Can you tell I spend a lot of time on the phone?
I used to know an ornithologist who put endless recordings of seasonal birdsong on his answering machine, so you had to wait and wait and wait for the chirping and warbling to stop before you could leave a message. He probably still does this, but fortunately I don’t know him anymore and have no reason to call him. (I love birds, btw. But please.)
In 1983 (February) I gave birth to my first child. My husband was unemployed, but had an interview a few days before she was born. We walked in the door, bringing home the baby, and the light on our answering machine was blinking. It was Westinghouse, calling with a job offer! Because of that job, I was able to quit mine and be home with the baby. The anwswer to my prayers!!
I can’t recall when we got our first machine, but I know we had one early in 1982. I had a miscarriage in January and remember getting messages of sympathy from people when I got home from the hospital.
I always wanted to have one of those celebrity voices answer on my machine – the best one I ever heard was Alfred Hitchcock – or someone who sounded an awful lot like him!
I wonder – am I the only brie-eating latte-swilling NPR fan whose only dream about having an answering maching involves being smart (clever, hip, trivial) enough to win on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” so we could get Carl Kasell’s voice on our answering machine?
Dusty – listening to music on someone’s 10 year old answering machine – with its fabulous acoustics – is enough to make me never want to listen to that so-called piece of music again. But I guess most of us – like other things – never actually hear that stuff cuz we don’t tend to call ourselves and leave messages – but there oughta be a law – you can’t put stuff on the outgoing message without having to listen to it. ALL of it.
Another of my rules – I tend to NOT want to leave a message for anyone who tells me that neither she nor her cat can come to the phone right now. I have a huge tolerance for certain forms of cute – that isn’t one of them.
Jim Rockford had an answering machine in 1974.
“This is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message and I’ll get back to you.”
Andi,
You know, I gather, that I did win Carl’s voice — for a lucky Balitmore lady. I tried to be gracious about it, but I was jealous.
Here in central WV – where cell phone service is sketchy at best – many have stuck with the basic answering machine, not moving forward to voice mail.
We use our machine to screen our calls. We do not answer the phone when eating, showering, or if we have company.
You should see company react when the phone rings and we don’t jump up. “Um,” they say, “the phone is ringing.”
Our reply? “Yes, that’s why we have an answering machine.”
Family and friends have learned this, and we have received countless messages of them saying something like, “Hello! It’s your mother! Pick up the phone!”
We also don’t get many hang ups. Why? I think it’s because our outgoing message says:
“Hi, we can’t come to the phone, but we’re around here somewhere.”
I remember that we acquired our first in about 1985 because we’d just moved to KY. It had cassette tapes and a blinking light, would run out of tape if you had too many messages.. It might have been made by AT&T or PhoneMate. It wasn’t very big, was freestanding, grey, and was not part of the same unit with the phone. Those came later.. Also, there were no affordable cell phones yet, and I’d a pager for my job… annoying, because then you had to find a phone to return the call.
Went and googled some to refresh my 1983 memories, and did find numerous mentions of the first digital phone answering machines: “The first digital tad was invented by Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto of Japan in mid-1983.” So, it’s unlikely that anyone in a scene in ’83 would have had a digital machine yet.
I never had the nerve to do a jokey OGM, but I’ve been tempted … tried something ‘clever’ that stayed on all of one day. Then, coward that I am, erased it.
http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/answering1.htm
http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/a/Answering.htm
P.S. There’s a photo here, scroll down to 1974. It looks very much like the first machine we had in the ’80s.. even same whitish-gray color. The upper left was where the tape casettes were… One for OGM, one for incoming messages.
http://www.dlink.com/products/resource.asp?pid=8&rid=18&sec=0
I do recall that we had to replace the incoming tape cassette at some point because the sound quality diminished with reuse and rewinding.. making the messages sound garbled..
All the recollectors here are correct — the dimensions were about 8 by 11ish, two tapes, tricky operation. In 1983 I carried a small beeper-type thing that you held to the mouthpiece when calling your phone for remote playback. It rarely worked as advertised. I carried the beeper for years, though; it was great for amusing cats and getting dogs to cock their heads in a highly cute fashion.
I do remember sitting at my desk, replaying a single message from an ex-boyfriend, a short one. I had one finger on pause, another on rewind, and I listened over, and over, and over. And over. I was like a Kremlinologist trying to catch a telltale quaver that would reveal More.
Hardly anyone ever called me, either. Once, after I started getting my picture in the paper, a guy called and left an 18-minute jerkoff message that I had to turn over to my editors and company security. (He said we worked together…we didn’t, I’m sure.) That’ll teach me to have a listed phone number.
More trouble than it was ever worth, that thing. VM is only a marginal improvement.
Does this help?
http://inventors.about.com/od/astartinventions/a/Answering.htm
It does, and I’ve found some other Internet sources that say there were 800,000 answering machines sold in 1982, so my character could be using one in 1983.
As it happens, this character is a bit of a Luddite (and proud of it) but he has a very specific reason for owning an answering machine. So I’d love to be able to describe a model specific to 1983 — its functions, its frustrations, its appearance.
By 1988, answering machines are so common that characters in Jay McInerney’s “Story of My Life” know each other’s codes. And one character fantasizes about inventing a machine that would allow you to blow up someone else’s answering machine, which I think is telling. (Technology for getting in touch with people quickly becomes technology for avoiding people as well.)
I know I didn’t have an answering machine until at least the mid to late 1980s. I’m trying to scroll back my memories but can’t remember just when I got one. And I didn’t leave a clever message. Still don’t. The most annoying answering machine message I’ve heard was the one by a close friend in Frostburg, Maryland, who did a little riff on the Meow Mix theme song (she has five cats). I never left a message because I always hung up before it was over.
And while we’re at it — anyone who knows anything about hospital billing procedures and the hierarchies of nursing homes, e-mail me!
I don’t remember answering machines being all that common in 1983. My boyfriend had one for his business; I think it was about 7″ by about 10″ and used standard-size cassette tapes, and it had a volume control so you could choose whether or not you wanted to hear the incoming message. I had a couple of machines over the course of time before I started using voice mail; I’ve never wanted to hear people leaving messages, but before caller ID it was the only call-screening option we had.
I do know a few people who still use unmuted answering machines rather than paying for the caller ID service from the phone company.
And I love voice mail from the phone company because I don’t have to worry about dealing with contrary contraptions. And I’ve progressed to the point where I don’t care about caller ID – I simply don’t answer my land line – the people I want to talk to have my cell phone number.
I did resist leaving cutesy outgoing messages – was always wary of prank calls / stalkers / etc.
I think it was a couple of years after that, that you could buy tapes so that your outgoing message (OGM) was a famous voice.(I still think it’s funny that the grand prize on the radio game show ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’ is to get Carl Kasell’s voice on your voicemail OGM.)
I think machines of that time had two tapes…a very very short one for the OGM and a 30-min one for the ICM….i think plot points at that time included the tape running out while leaving a Very Important Message…oh, and those were the machines that the length of the beep was as long as all of the messages on the tape before you. ….that also was shortly before they figured out you should be able to call your own machine and dial a 3-digit code to get your messages before you came home. …..
my grandfather refused to leave a message, instead listening to the entire OGM then calling later to complain about the length of the OGM and the long-distance money he had spent in order for us not to be home. how rude of us!
…it’s all a different vibe than even today’s phenomena of Roommates/Coworkers Refusing to Take Messages. As in, “She’s not hear right now, do you want to call back and leave a message on her voice mail?”
..it’s all a different vibe than even today’s phenomena of Roommates/Coworkers Refusing to Take Messages. As in, “She’s not hear right now, do you want to call back and leave a message on her voice mail?”
Considering how many messages get garbled in the transmission, this is actually a prudent thing to do.
on the taking message/phone thing- My son is 20, my daughter is 18 and my husband is older. I have repeatedly told them that unless a phone call is an emergency or Johnny Depp has gotten tired of his partner and is calling me- No one is to bother me in the bathroom- and yet they always do. What does my husband knock on the bathroom door about on Sunday- a local political campaign wants to know if it can use my name(no, I am not famous or rich- they just want to publish a long list of supporters). How does that translate into an emergency or Johnny Depp(no, he is not the candidate)
They were called Record-O-Phones (The mechanical secretary!) and they worked about once in four calls. You could play back your messages from another phone by calling the machine and using this handheld device that emitted a high pitched squeal when the machine picked up. It was orange and about the size of an AT&T phone. It used a regular cassette tap and was top loading.
This is great stuff. How did I end up knowing so many smart people?
As I said, my character has a very good reason to be an early adapter in the world of answering machines. As it happens, I could nudge the year up to 1984, but I find that year too resonant and I already have a section set in 1976, another overly freighted year.
I just realized I’m going to need to list A LOT of people in the acknowledgments for this one . . . and that’s just for this one chapter!
Thanks again. Dusty, I will buy you many drinks, maybe even dinner in Omaha. Annie, we never had our ice cream date in Chicago, but I’ll be in Skokie this July!
Oh, we definitely need our ice cream adventure, aka ‘intellectual pursuit’, Laura. So, it’s definitely a date!
(Will you be at the Skokie Barnes & Noble? Can’t think of another bookstore there..)
The early machines did have two tapes. The outgoing one didn’t rewind but was an endless loop of a set length. It had a strip of foil, so that it could reset to the correct starting place. Both of the tapes wore out. The incoming message tapes didn’t have a leader, so that you couldn’t use an ordinary tape, or you’d miss the first fifteen seconds or so of the first message.
I still know people who won’t leave a mesage. it doesn’t even depend if it’s to a cat. The quality of the sound could be OK, tape technogy, was quite developed, by that time. But, a lot of machines used pretty cheep audio parts, even though, they seemed quite pricey.
We got our first one in 1988, for a wedding present. VERY exciting, at the time! No help to you for research, though, Laura…
Now I hate checking messages so much I ask people to email me if they want to get me quickly.
Wait, Laura, you were on WAIT WAIT DON’T TELL ME???
and I missed it?
I didn’t have one until 1991. When we got it, I decided I was the new Rich Little. I had Diane play the opening credits to TERMINATOR 2 while I recorded, in my best Arnold, “We ahre not available to take your call now. We ahre out looking for Sarah Caaahner. Leave a message at the beep. If you do not leave a message, you will be terminated. Hasta la vista, baby.”
We got a lot of strange messages left on that one.
I also did one in Klingon, which actually hurt to say. (Why is there a Klingon language?) The following year, I did Bush, Sr., one of Clinton saying he and Hillary were out getting drapes for their new DC digs, and Ross Perot: “May I finihs? I haven’t finished. See, here’s the deal. I’m not here. You’re gonna leave a message.”
Then we got voicemail, and I decided to quit abusing the answering machine.