Only slightly related, but a story from back when pay phones were still a common thing.
My first or second year of high school I lived in a rural town in Washington state with very little to do. But it was also a tourist destination. In the summer me and my friends would just sit around downtown (this was 1 street with a 4 way stop) trying to figure out what to do with our days. One day the pay phone was randomly ringing and we picked it up.
It was two girls, near our age, who were also bored and had written down the number of that pay phone and were randomly calling it. They were from out of town (if they lived there we'd have known them, it was that small of a place) and staying at their grandfathers funky vacation home just a couple of miles away.
We ended up meeting up with them and got up to all sorts of trouble that summer. We were friends for years and years after. I'm still occasionally in touch with one of them, over 25 years later.
Just a completely random way to meet some new friends that I can't imagine happening anymore.
It's so difficult to describe what life was like before cell phones and the internet. Imagine making and carrying out plans with people and not being able to easily communicate with them in the moments leading up to meeting.
My brother still operates like this. For example on Monday he will say "I'll see you after work on Thursday". He won't call to tell you he's on his way. He won't confirm the night before. He just shows up after work on Thursday. When exactly? After work like he said. It feels so adult and self-assured compared to dealing with other people.
If you like learning about telephone system, phone phreak Evan Doorbell has a very interesting series of podcasts about his time exploring the telephone system in the 1970's. The podcasts include his recordings from that time period.
It was neat to hear some of the old tones and recorded messages I grew up with, as well as ones that were well before my time:
Yeah! This stuff is a total gas. Here's this professional-broadcaster-quality voice, narrating a personal story about 50 year-old recordings of noises made by equipment that doesn't exist any more. (With threats by 'Ernestine') So: pure entertainment.
After the series of many narrated tapes, there's another series of raw tapes (unnarrated ... test what you've learned).
yeah, I love Evan's stuff, especially the recordings about George, the answering machine, and random answering machine outgoing messages from the 80's Atlanta area. fantastic!
Back when payphones were still a thing, one prank I enjoyed was to dial 991-$(last 4 digits of the pay phone's phone number) from a payphone. Then you would hangup, pickup, and hangup again. Then a few seconds later the payphone would start ringing.
I have no idea what this was actually doing. Does anyone have any knowledge of how this worked?
I don't even remember how I learned this trick. Presumably I learned it from some other kid, but who knows where the knowledge originated from in our teenage social circle.
In Australia back in the day, you could dial 199 on a pay phone which was the ring back number. Hang up, let it ring twice and then answer it. If you did it right there would be a warbling tone in the earpiece and you could then make any call for free.
In the NYC vicinity, dialing the -9901 suffix on many phone exchanges will give you a recorded message identifying the central office you reached. For example, if you call (212) 736-9901, it tells you that the switch is on West 36th Street[1] and a list of area codes/prefixes it serves. Amusingly, the switch still identifies itself as "Bell Atlantic", which is what the local Regional Bell Operating Company was called before it became "Verizon" in 2000 (it was also briefly "NYNEX").[2]
NYNEX: just clicked that's what Phantom Phreak from Hackers was on about: "the Phantom Phreak, king of NYNEX". And looking at the dates, seems to gel... took me that long to figure out what was said there!
This makes me feel old. I remember seeing Hackers in the theater, when it came out, back in 1995. NYNEX was the local RBOC. Broadband wasn't a thing yet, and everyone was still on dialup.
Briefly? The New York / New England RBOC was called NYNEX for most of the 80's and 90's, a lot longer than it was Bell Atlantic. Bell Atlantic was just a 3 or 4 year thing after it acquired NYNEX.
You're right: NYNEX existed from 1984 (breakup of Bell System) to 1997. But Bell Atlantic was also an RBOC created in 1984. The two companies merged in 1997, with the resulting company being called Bell Atlantic (which was when NY's phone company became Bell Atlantic). Finally, Bell Atlantic acquired GTE in 2000 to form Verizon.[1]
RBOC history is so crazy when you read about it.
All these companies were broken up to eventually reform into huge corporate behemoths again, only decades later ("new" AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen / Century Link) It makes me wonder if we weren't better off just keeping the original AT&T together.
I always enjoy reading about this kind of stuff even though a lot of is only applicable in the US. On UK landlines you can dial 17070 to access BT line test functions.
When you dial a very well spoken voice reads your phone number back to you. It's rarely been useful to me but I did once astonish someone by using it, they were convinced it was meant to be a secret number and that I was probably breaking the law!
Shout out to Telco Inside, oldskoolphreak, PLA, BinRev, Default Radio and all the other late torchbearers of phreaking in the early '00s =] Miss those days.
There used to be a Strowger switch still functioning around that time period... Sure it's gone nowadays but it was really cool to call in & play around on it.
I had a lot of fun with lists like these in the 70s/80s. To this day I give all of my creditors a phone number which I know has rung busy since 1983 thanks to lists like these. It would be very interesting to war-dial all of the US exchanges in 2022 to see what answers.
This makes my heart smile. Rarely these days I’ll connect with a phellow phreak and we chat about bridge parties and other fun stuff. One day the fone number will be a thing of the past and all this an ancient memory.
There used to be (maybe still is) an 800 number you could call to get your ANI, basically the billing number for whatever phone you were calling from. Kinda fun.
For the second one, I'm getting "Please, enter your password", then, after typing the passcode – "The toll-free number you have dialed has been disconnected. No further information is available about this number. 074T"
The magic of the PSTN was you could work your way into the bowels of the Military and talk to a guy guarding nukes just by dialing the right number and bullshitting. Today you can't really social engineer your way into unauthorized access on Slack, for example (you have to have an account first). I suppose e-mail is the final remnant of the information wild west. Well, that and public ELK stacks...
If you dig into Evan Doorbell's stuff, he explains this nicely. It has to do with where the intercept was caught (the particular CO / switch level / device).
Not quite in the spirit, I suppose, but you can find out more about most of the numbers by googling them. One guy published youtube videos for a couple of them. Kind of fun.
This reminds me of a weird payphone trick from when I was younger. I grew up in Santa Monica, which had GTE as the local phone provider (I mention this because this trick did NOT work on Pacific Bell payphones). They also owned all the payphones in the area. One day, I was messing around with the payphone after school, and decided to call the AT&T Alliance Teleconferencing number. This was a number where you could setup both an incoming conference call and the owner of the conference could make outgoing calls. It cost more than a dollar a minute per active line, and this was in the early 1990s, so it was really expensive. Anyhow, the phone number for AT&T Alliance Teleconferencing was a weird one, it was 0700-555-1212. Because it had a leading 0 for the number, it wasn't filtered correctly on the pay phones, so you could call it directly. This worked for years before they finally figured it out and filtered it on payphones.
At one of the HOPEs, someone brought a bunch of 8-bit machines and set them up in the mezzanine. Among them was a TI 99/4A, which for all its failings, had a very nice sound chip accessible from TI BASIC. And, bless whoever brought it, the TI BASIC quick reference card was tucked under the machine, which was all I needed to jog my memory. I implemented a quick tone-dialer with DTMF and redbox tones, adjustable twist, and a few other features.
Since there was no tape deck and everything was just resident in RAM, I fully expected that someone would reboot the machine and do something else with it moments after I walked away. It was fun in the moment, that's all I wanted. Much to my surprise, I came back several hours later and there were folks playing with the dialer, and to my even greater surprise, someone had extended it with MF and bluebox tones in the interim!
It has the Hall and Oats recording number, but is missing the one for They Might Be Giants. Does anyone know if it's still active?
TMBG used to release all of their new music on an answering machine before you could buy it. Kind of a pre-internet version of artists releasing singles on YouTube before you can buy the album.
Potentially as a backup distribution service. If you're running a translator transmitter to extend service range, and can't get the signal some other way, maybe you can dial in and pipe the phone out the radio.
the three funnest things i did in the waning age of the phreak era in the mid-2000s in highschool:
1. finding this test extension number, xxx-4111, which i broke the truancy bot with which would call everyone's parents who had skipped class that day from the nortel meridan pbx and inform them that their son or daughter (name) was skipping (period). this test extension number cut out the line for noise testing completely for a few minutes, so the bot would just skip people ahead of me too whenever i would skip class (Almost every day, I had more fun taking girls out to do bad things after convincing them I broke the robot, zero regrets). I think it's called a silent termination test line - you might be able to find your own here: https://www.sandman.com/colookup
2. finding another number on that test extension. i think it was xxx-8111, and since this was a toll free extension this was dialable for free from payphones. you waited like 30 seconds hearing nothing but silence, then a dial tone. you could dial anywhere for free with this. none of the phone company employees i've asked seems to know wtf this was but the school was close to a headquarters so i'm just thinking we were on the same trunk. and back then, you could just download gargantuan phone number lists in .txt format from people with waaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands like phonelosers for fun numbers to call. was hilarious when some friend of mine made the mistake of trying to print this out cause it was filled with obscenities and stuff without realizing it was goddamn reams of paper. he used some dead kid's account though so he didn't get caught. haha i think the guy who did those lists went to jail, rbcp?
3. getting onto my school's intercom. *, 5, 1 and boom that was it. I found it handscanning. I only went on to actually say something the last day and I just pretended like I was crazy when I was caught so they let me go. I think the girl who went on after me was like GRAD '07 WOOOOOOO!
I'm always astonished that after 30 years and the installation of two giant data centers, this little Oregon town hasn't upgraded its telephone exchange. Anyway, here's an automated ghost from the past: 541-447-0054
I cam into this scene pretty late(early 2000's) but I loved playing around with payphones. I have a great memory of calling random 1800 numbers until I found one that gave me back a dial tone! I was so excited I called a friend of mine. He didn't care at all lol.
The PLA phonebook was a blast too. For one of my birthday parties my friends and I huddled around a phone and called elevators, bowling alleys around the country, and prank called a few embassies.
Does anyone have a lead on a download link for the PLA BBS? I would love to play around with it again, maybe host my own version.
Decibels are only ever a relative measurement on a logarithmic scale. In this case, we aren't even talking about sound (these are dB of power), but this is true independent of base unit. For sound, to represent silence, you actually need -∞ dB. The fact that this is a relative scale is also why your mixer/home theatre receiver represents full intensity as 0 dB and any volume adjustments as some negative number of dB (some mixers may allow you to go a little bit over 0 dB but of course this risks clipping when a full-strength signal comes in).
Fun fact though: the sound scale is capped on the upper extreme depending on your environment. You know how recordings of launches of rockets sound like the sound is clipping? It's not hardware limitations. The sound is actually clipping as the pressure hits vacuum. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_pressure#Sound_pressure_... .
A 0dB tone is a tuning tone. Most amplifiers are tuned to a particular frequency at 0dB, and with a good phone connection, you can even do this over the wire. It's problematic if there are too many hops between you and the source. For example, calling a 0dB tone in a small CO in central Montana didn't give me a usable reference when I was calling from Huntsville, AL, in the 1970's. There were about four hops in there.
It was originally 1000Hz, but it turns out this could cause framing errors on D4 trunks because the framing recovery circuit could misidentify the bit pattern as valid framing bits. So they changed it to 1004Hz, enough to sidestep the problem, but still close enough that it would still represent "exactly" a milliwatt of energy, within the required precision of the instruments anyway.
When ESF framing was invented, precise tones no longer posed a problem, but a lot of D4 trunks hung around for decades, so last I checked most milliwatt tones were still 1004Hz.
Someone set up a strange number with something like this a while ago, with a bunch of randomized recordings. Some of these appear to be inside jokes or otherwise have hidden meanings about unorthodox behavior from phone systems - +1-248-200-0008.
My first or second year of high school I lived in a rural town in Washington state with very little to do. But it was also a tourist destination. In the summer me and my friends would just sit around downtown (this was 1 street with a 4 way stop) trying to figure out what to do with our days. One day the pay phone was randomly ringing and we picked it up.
It was two girls, near our age, who were also bored and had written down the number of that pay phone and were randomly calling it. They were from out of town (if they lived there we'd have known them, it was that small of a place) and staying at their grandfathers funky vacation home just a couple of miles away.
We ended up meeting up with them and got up to all sorts of trouble that summer. We were friends for years and years after. I'm still occasionally in touch with one of them, over 25 years later.
Just a completely random way to meet some new friends that I can't imagine happening anymore.