In the darkest corner of every Columbia dorm room lies an object of great curiosity. A ROLM phone. A relic of another era (specifically, the era beginning in the late 1980s and ending with the ubiquity of the cellular telephone), the ROLM phone is never touched, except on move-in day, when it is stowed away, out of sight and out of mind. But as a recently rebroadcast segment on This American Life reminds us, the ROLM wasn't always just a hideously oversized paperweight.
