Now they are mostly gone.
I remember being in the Marines in the early 1980s and on the base, we would queue up for over an hour to speak on the few payphones that were provided. We would put a dime in there and make a collect call, otherwise, every 90 seconds or so, we would be asked to dump more spare change into the coin slot to keep the call going.
If you went up to a group of people back in 1982 and told them that soon, everybody would be carrying around a phone that could not only call anywhere in the world, but could be used to pay for things, play games, watch videos and listen to music, etc., they would think you were a nutcase.
Now what about those machines that used to hold the newspapers? Back then, you would have all these newspaper vending machines all over the place. People would actually obtain newspapers in this manner.
I loved that scene from Bullitt where McQueen smirks after asking Duvall how he knew it was a long distance call: "He put in a lotta change!"