Decades later, those numbers aren’t just digits ... It isn’t necessarily a belief that a disconnected rotary phone is capable of connecting with the dead. It’s that using this old device ...

is that rapid numeric keying is not what this rotary dial numpad keyboard is all about. In fact, it’s actually an April Fool’s prank [Squidgeefish] played on a retro-phone-obsessed coworker ...

so he compromised with an mp3 of a rotary ringer. [Tal] also wanted a way to have dialed-number feedback without cutting up the phone to add a screen, so he found a text-to-speech library and made ...