When I was a teenager during the 1960s, we didn’t have cell phones. There were no personal computers. The Internet hadn’t been built. When I and the other boomers grew up we were in a culture a bit ahead of the good ol’ days of letters in longhand and visits of six weeks, but not much. We communicated by hardwired landline telephones or the U.S. mail.

Our phone system was the best in the world. Our innovators were converting us from a rotary dial to pushbuttons during that decade. I remember the telephone display at Disney’s Tomorrowland; I prided myself on being fast at the dial but no matter how swiftly my fingers pushed that ring around, my brother Steve, standing by my side at the newfangled unit with the button pad, was able to make the connection more quickly.

The fact was, dialers didn’t stand a chance against buttons, speed-wise. Unless the phone number consisted of only low digits, it just took too long to pull that wheel clockwise and then push it back. An 8 or 9 or 0 in the phone number was a drag.

But those dials had been innovative in their time. They’d replaced talking to an operator. When rotary dials arrived, so did the dial tone: the audible clue that the system is ready for you to give it an address. We still call that ready signal a dial tone, even though today’s kids don’t know a rotary phone from an Edsel.

And although kids now connect in more and faster ways, they don’t connect as much as they want. I think this verse, written the summer I was 15, still says something.

The hand now pushes buttons down
That disconnect a busy line,
And then release a dial tone,
An empty hum, a lifeless whine.

The dimming eyes reflect no thought.
They blankly stare down at the phone.
They see their boredom can’t be fought
By what is now an empty moan.

The spark within the unused brain
Can’t understand why life’s a bore.
Why did she seek a voice in vain,
And only hear a hum once more?

Why should she spend her life this way,
Depending on these things alone?
Just kindle flames from dying sparks
And never hear a dial tone.