The three-piece genre-fluid band Dial Tone rehearses in the basement of guitarist Cole Pivec’s house in the Linden Hills neighborhood of southwest Minneapolis. It is a setting natural to any college ...

When was the last time you heard a dial tone? If you’re young enough, you might not even know what a dial tone is. You might not understand that we used to hear a droning buzz whenever we picked up ...

Phones have come a long way since the old landline days. Our smartphones are light, fast, and have more computing power than NASA used to put a man on the moon.* Some advances came not by adding ...

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. Reading time 2 minutes In ...

Does a cellphone have a dial tone? Mobile cellphone never have a dial tone. Before the cellphone came into common usage, a dial tone on a landline told you that the line was available; however, it is ...

In a college house near the East Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, there is a spacious walk-in closet where the band Dial Tone recorded their self-titled debut album. Dial Tone consists of ...

Before dial telephones, we made phone calls through an operator. You picked up the phone, there was no dial tone, and you talked to an operator who placed the call for you. This was the only way to ...

One late night many decades ago, I chanced upon a technical description of the Touch-Tone system. The book I was reading had an explanation of how each key on a telephone sends a combination of two ...

Last month, Robber Robber announced their debut album Wild Guess and released the idiosyncratic lead single “Backup Plan.” Today, the Burlington post-punk quartet is back with the bewitching, chaotic ...