I bought a nice old black bakelite rotary phone on eBay for a dollar. After cleaning the phone from half a century of crud and splicing in a modular jack I plugged it in. Guess what - it still works!

(image taken from this auction)

Ahh, the forgotten sound of the clickety-clack of the rotary dial. Do you still remember it? And this phone _will_ work in a blackout. I think I'll buy another couple of phones just to rip out the rotary dialer and play with it. I wonder if the robotic dialer they showed in the first Matrix movie was something that actually existed. Dialer pens on the other hand existed for sure:

(image taken from this auction )