For a while I had one of the chunky old black AT&T desk phones set up in the living room, wired to our ISP-provided VoIP box. One afternoon my 7 year old niece was visiting and we realized she'd never actually interacted with a land-line, so we spent the next hour playing with it. It took her a little bit to figure out the physical actions of lifting the handset and dialing the number, but then she had an absolute blast calling her parents, her grandma, my wife, and me. I snuck upstairs and called her, which surprised her.

When I was a kid, I liked to play with the old rotary phone in the shop, and I always wanted to goof around with mom's old typewriter. There's something about these very tactile old devices that appeals to kids (and adults)