One ringy dingy…two ringy dingy. Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?

These lines were made famous by Lily Tomlin when she starred on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1970.Her character was named Ernestine. She portrayed a nosy, condescending telephone operator who sported a 1940s hairstyle complete with a hair net.She would have us laughing with her snorting sounds she made each time she made smart aleck remarks to the caller or when she was listening in on some juicy gossip. She would sit at her chair pretending to plug in the wires at her switchboard connecting calls.Today we have traded switchboards for cell towers.The first phone I remember was a beige, bell system dial wall phone. It hung on our kitchen wall near a window that looked out over our farm. It was in the early 1960s so we were still part of a party line.Our line was divided between four other homes. If one of the parties got a call, all five homes would ring. Each home had a designated ring. Such as a single long ring, or maybe two short rings or a long and a short. We could pick up the receiver and listen in on other conversations.We had only one telephone on the farm for years.Tall wooden utility or telephone poles lined the gravel roads. The poles were always in danger of being split by lightning strikes or a driving mishap that would knock it down. In this case our phones would be out of service for at least a week.About the time Tomlin was making her switchboard operator jokes the first communication satellites were launched. I still remember trying to spot the tiny light of Echo 1 or Telstar as it made its way across the dark, vast Midwest skies back then.I have witnessed big changes in my life time. I went from a telephone party line, which was our basic way of communication, to the world of cable TV with more stations than I can ever watch, high speed computers and do-it-all cellphones.Our household now has six televisions.We have one desktop computer and one Kindle on which I can read a book or check my email.We have a land telephone line with a phone in five different rooms. Our line has call waiting, caller ID and an answering machine so we don't miss any calls.My husband and I each have our own cellphone in which we can store contact information (our telephone book), keep track of appointments, and set reminders (gotta take those pills), use a built-in calculator, send or receive email anytime, get current information like the news and weather when you need it, play games (never know when you are stuck in traffic), send text messages (love this for our grandkids), take and send photos or videos to family and friends. And of course make and receive phone calls, all from a phone in the palm of your hand. The service may go down but probably for only a few hours, not a whole week.Just as Ernestine plugged calls into a switchboard, we need to plug our cellphones into electric outlets to get recharged.Technology and communication have come a long way in the past 60 years, and there are still more exciting things to come our way in the future.