Bygone telephone feature

The answer to this crossword question is ‘DIAL‘ and it refers to a bygone telephone feature. In the early days of telephones, before modern push-button phones, people had to dial a number by rotating a circular dial on the phone. The dial had numbers from 1 to 0, which corresponded to different electrical pulses sent to the phone company to connect the call. The dial was replaced by touch-tone dialing in the mid-20th century, but the term ‘dial‘ is still used to refer to the act of calling someone on the phone. Therefore, if you come across the question ‘Bygone telephone feature is DIAL‘ in a crossword puzzle, the answer would logically be ‘DIAL‘.