Oh I've just been having a geek reminisce & watching the early "Buffy the Vampire slayer" series's. It's brilliant. No mobile phones & the landline phones have cords!!!! Cool.
Last year they had a nationwide call out for people who had old corded phones buried somewhere to send to Christchurch for after the earthquake. They got the landlines up & running fairly quickly but many people were without electricity for weeks. Made me wish I'd hung on to mine back when. We only get pretty mild shakes down here, but if Chch is on a confluence of fault lines like some geologist have theorised then that means the big one is still a coming. guess old technology does still have it's uses.