> You click the handset down, like you are hanging up the phone, but just very briefly.

This brings back memories, this is a trick people my age group mastered as teenagers in a 3rd world country. All calls were billed - including local ones, so parents would commonly get lockable cages that would cover the buttons/rotary dial to prevent unauthorised calls in their absence. The cages would leave the receiver accessible even when locked in order to be able to receive calls, so we would use the hook to do pulse tone dialing; dialing a number with many zeroes was always a challenge since it required 10 rapid taps as part of a longer sequence, but I built up muscle memory.

The practice was colloquially named 'tap-dialing' and it was handed down from generation to generation. Sadly it came to an end in the smartphone world.

The old GTE payphones up in Georgetown, Tx (suburb of Austin, now) when I was a kid would let you dial with the switchhook - no coins required. Agreed, zeroes were a pain, but this was partially compensated for by the fact that 5-digit dialing worked for any local number, e.g. 3-1234 got you 863-1234. Interestingly, most VoIP adapters support the pulse dialing of an old phone, but very few have the cojones to actually ring one that has a physical bell rather than an electronic ringer...

Er, I'm not sure where you got this information from, but I can tell you categorically that ATAs that support pulse dialing are few and far between. Source: I have a vintage phone collection and wish bitterly the reality were different. (I use a Avaya PBX as a bridge to asterisk/IP telephony as a practical alternative)

That’s because the traditional physical bell needs a high voltage (relative to the digital circuits in modern hardware).

https://www.epanorama.net/circuits/telephone_ringer.html:

”The voltage at the subscribers end depends upon loop length and number of ringers attached to the line; it could be between 40 and 150 Volts.”

I think they also (relatively to the hardware in a VoIP adapter) need a large amount of power.

So, to ring that bell, you need to transform your 5V/3V/…, and you need a larger power circuit. That isn’t worth it for the few who still have an old-style telephone.

I think you need the high voltage anyway, even for a fake bell. The power is probably the problem.

I've seen some grandstreams that'll run a ringer.

Second this, I've had no trouble ringing an old GPO 746 telephone (and very loudly) with a Grandstream HT802

It was also an old school way of phreaking and getting free calls in a phone box.

I was very surprised a couple of weeks ago, making a call on a fixed-wireless 4G modem with a phone jack on it, that it supported pulse dialing. (The handset plugged into it happened to be set for pulse, you see.)

I wonder if something like that would get implemented to address a historical regulatory requirement.

Ah, thanks! I grew up using a rotary dial phone but of course was too young to think that much about how it actually works. Learned something new today!

It's been awhile since I tried it, but isn't it n+1 presses to dial n? So you can dial 0 with one click.

No; if you look at an old rotary phone, you're counting the number of finger holes in order to determine pulses.

To dial a 0, pulse the line 10 times.

Unless you are in New Zealand - the dial is numbered "backwards" there so 0 is 1 pulse etc.

Oh wow, thank you for the memories :) I grew up in New Zealand when everything was pulse dialing and had an American modem that my father got us, so in order to dial any phone number I had to rewrite it by subtracting every digit from 10.

It seems I remembered correctly. I'm from Sweden and we use the system I recalled. All of you correcting me are right with regards to most other countries.

"0" was coded with 10 pulses

No, 0 is ten pulses.

As I said, not in Sweden.