I didn’t take apart a phone to get it, but I managed to buy a rotary dial mechanism from a surplus store near where I grew up when I was a teen (maybe thirty years ago?). I think I’ve still got it in a drawer. It’s honestly a very clever design, and the sound is kind of weirdly soothing.

Agreed.

I sort of think everyone should have a chance to play with an Ames Room at least once in their life.

That’s still about 1000x less raw CPU performance than the cheapest smartphone on the market, though.

(E.g. a Blu View 5 Pro, which is the cheapest Tracfone is listing as in stock, for $30. Its Helio G36 uses 4 Cortex A53 cores at 2200MHz and 4 at 1800 MHz, and between 1-2 instructions per clock, giving between 16000-32000 million instructions per second. The IBM ran at 16.6 million instructions per second, per that Wikipedia link.)

(Looking at Walmart turned up a TCL K33 5G for only $20, but it uses a Dimensity 6300 cpu which is actually a little more powerful.)