I'm trying to imagine a conversation with a Bell engineer in the 80s explaining that, in the future, a 4-year old phone won't be expected to call 911 any more.
These phones couldn’t do the thing in question even when 0 years old, due to a bug, and failure to fix that is the reason for getting blocked from the networks
context: from a landline you could call 911 even without a phone handset, simply by (un)touching the wires with the right timing. And this would even work in a multi-day power outage thanks to the battery banks at the central office.
Yeah, I'll freely admit I'm a curmudgeon with respect to technology "upgrades", but we've really lost a lot of solid reliability in our phone systems (landlines at least)
Now it feels like an afterthought compared to all of the redundancies they had put in place back then.
I experienced local POTS phone lines for something like my first 35 years.
Bad ice storms? Weeks-long power outages? Whatever; POTS didn't care.
The only time I ever picked up a real telephone at home and didn't get a dialtone, I wandered out to investigate and saw the wire for the house just laying there in the alley -- apparently, it'd been hooked by a passing truck.
They (The Phone Company) had it fixed within one hour after we let them know.
(An hour of downtime over 35 years. How many nines is that?)
