This Hacked Rotary Phone Gives ‘Dial-Up Internet’ a More Literal Meaning

Though you might correctly consider the smartphone that you carry in your pocket to be an “Internet phone,” what if you were to take this very literally, and instead of a touchscreen interface, used only a rotary dial? What you’d have is something like what students came up with for a course in physical computing at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (taught, in part by Arduino’s Massimo Banzi).

Their device allows the user to input a website’s IP 12-digit IP address via a rotary phone hacked with an Arduino. Addresses are listed in a physical Yellow Pages-like paper directory akin to how a domain name server works today, and once the correct numbers are dialed, users are treated to an audio version of the selected website.

The voice-to-speech reading of the website is comparable to how a browser translates HTML and CSS code into human understandable content.

To mimic the experience of actually being online, the team also created a set of mode tokens that change the phone’s behavior — article, developer, incognito and history. These are activated by unscrewing the receiver’s microphone cap, and placing one inside.

In the article mode, the phone formats a website as an article and omits unimportant content. In developer mode, the phone reads the entire HTML content of a website. In the incognito mode, your browsing become anonymous. And in the history token mode, the phone recalls the last five visited webpages.

As seen in the street test videos below, users seem quite entertained by the concept!