She also had the hard-wired phone handsets rewired to use big, clunky four-prong plugs, so she could install a RadioShack-branded answering machine that was the size of a small suitcase. They hadn’t invented controllers that could rewind the outgoing message cassette, so you had to use a special cassette with an infinite loop.

You’d think that back then we had to walk uphill to AND from school, in a blizzard, in June, but actually, the weather wasn’t much worse than today and yes, hang out on my lawn all you like.

Huh, interesting.

As a bit of vaguely-relevant trivia, I found this fascinating recording someone made of some phone systems from the early-mid 70s: http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/VRHQ.mp3 (~30min) (from http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/, "Two Early Voice Recognition Systems"). Not quite answering machines, but if the same technical acumen were applied to recording messages I expect the result would have been very impressive.

I look at this as an interesting way to get an idea of the bounds of the status quo of where technology was generally at around the ~70s. This is really cool, but also within the bounds of what was reasonably conceivable and maintainable for the period. The recording notes that system/technology was observed finding its way into a few different use cases.