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My house had one of those in the UK in the 70's. My Nan had to give our neighbour a telling off for butting into a conversation with my mother.

my aunt and uncle's farm in interior BC had this setup until the late 90s, well into the 56K modem era. Remember other people in your house yelling at you to turn off the internet because they had to use the phone? Imagine that scaled up to a dozen houses :)

Small world. I spent some long weekends at a cabin on green lake (BC interior) with a party line.

Party lines used standard telephone lines. The joke was that they had nothing to do with the cost of the wire. The cost of the wire is a tiny part of the cost of installing the system. It was the phone company not wanting to install the switching gear. Sometimes the party line was tied together within BC-Tell's box. So when they installed better switching gear everyone suddenly had their own line. That's different than barbwire rigs that ran over single lines. (BC-Tell is now called "telus")

Pretty sure BC-Tel only has the one L in it.

In the days before Facebook, simply picking up the phone could well result in fun conversations with our neighbors. Fun times were had by all.