telephone

In the olden days you had one of these attached to a wire, often in the hallway. Your mates could phone you on them and you could sit and chat from the bottom step until someone told you to “get off the bloody phone”. Usually because “it’ll cost a bloody fortune” but sometimes because they needed to use it themselves to telephone one of their friends.
If you weren’t lucky enough to live in a fancy house that had one of these revolutionary items then you had to go to a box down the road and stick a load of 10p’s in it to chat. 
Till the beeps went. 

Simple times.