Scott said<

>>... if anyone remembers old land line dial phones.....ever notice how indestructible that plastic was ?  You could slam one of those to the floor as hard as you want , or use the handset to hammer in nails ...................they used completely indestructible ( or nearly ) plastic on those old phones.  <<

  You've got a bit of an apples and oranges comparison going on there, Scott.

  I expect that the main reason phones were so well built was that the
local phone companies owned the sets and leased them to their
customers.

  Maintenance was taken care of by the company, and servicing the
equipment was the job of the company and provided without extra
charge, so the service provider had a stake in keeping costs down.

  I might also add that the phone companies designed and built nearly
all of their own equipment.  Western Electric was a wholly owned
subsidiary of AT&T, and other manufacturers of built to WECO
standards- wasn't military spec, but damn close! <G>

  I worked with old fashioned dial equipment that had been in place
nearly 50 years before being replaced in 1978 with switch that was
already obsolete. It's was with a digital switch after maybe 30 years
online, tops.

 Not many automobile companies out there that offer a product that has
a 20+ year design life.

George Bellhead/ATL, ex- phonie