The Bell System companies (the regional Bell companies such as Southern Bell and Illinois Bell) usually followed the rules laid down by AT&T–but not always. Some of these companies, rejecting “Ma Bell’s” instructions to discourage answering machine use,  found that renting answering machines to customers was good business, not the potential disaster that AT&T feared.

The Electronic Secretary (above) was one of the first of the postwar answering machines to see widespread in the U.S. The original model, introduced in 1949, recorded magnetically on wire and used a 45-rpm record as the outgoing message. Later models used two tape transports, one for incoming messages and one for the outgoing message. Similiar systems began to appear in larger numbers in the 1960s.