The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed how people communicate at work: Nearly half of people videoconference more, 43% email more, 42% call more, and 41% text more than before the pandemic, ...

Switchboard operators were once an essential part of telephone communication in the late 19th- into the early 20th century. During that time, technology wasn’t advanced enough for people to directly ...

Before cellphones, before dial-up, if you wanted to make a phone call, you talked to an operator. That operator sat in front of a wall covered in... Jun 19, 2017 — Before cellphones, before dial-up, ...

They’re pulling the plug on California’s last manual telephone switchboard. A computer was being installed this week to replace Kerman Telephone’s four manual units. Rena McDonald of the California ...

The first telephones were hard enough to use without the added harassment of the teenage boys who worked as the earliest switchboard operators — and who were, per PBS, notoriously rude. It was ...

A reunion of Maine switchboard operators highlights the challenges of making a phone call more than 50 years ago and what it was like to handle... Telephone operators of another era gather to ...

Before smartphones, most people kept in touch using landline telephones. And before direct dialing was common, some calls were handled by switchboard operators. During the 1950s, more than 220,000 ...