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Installing a payphone in my house

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Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#91

Post by Slartie »

nahmean wrote: post #39
jjeaff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it literally just the sound of money dropping that validated the call? Presumably this was before automatic switching and a live operator had to connect you?

At one point it was. You could even record the sound on a handheld recorder and play it back. But it hasn’t worked in a long while. Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset. Edit: oh yeah, and after that, you’d just call the operator and tell them the keys were sticky and to dial the number for you, then you’d “insert the coins” by playing the tones. Well, or you just third party b…

> Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset.

So does this mean that there was a dedicated second microphone hidden somewhere within the payphone body, that would continue to record the sound the coins made?

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#92

Post by kalleboo »

cbhl wrote: post #36

I feel like the logical next step is for the author to discover PBX, such as Asterisk or something built on top of it. Then they can call between the two in-house phones and also dial out to the real phone line in an emergency. Just need an old PC, a compatible dial-up modem with voice, and a card with a few FXO ports to go to the payphone and child's phone...

You can also get used Cisco VoIP ATAs for cheap from eBay (mine was $20) with 2 lines that can be programmed for internal calls and incoming/outgoing SIP, that's what I did to play around with old modems and also set up 2 old-style phones to play phone with my kids.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#93

Post by makeitdouble »

nickles wrote: post #70
makeitdouble wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 12 random numbers, and I assume banks reject some numbers based on obviousness (e.g. all 0, all 1s, 1234, all 3 groups are identical etc.) so I'd assume there's actually less probability space than what we'd expect. Even if it's still a pretty huge space.

Credit card numbers aren’t entirely random [0] https://medium.com/@ma.juber/mathematics-behind-credit-debit...

Sorry I think I'm missing it, does that page explain somewhere how the 12 digits that are not set by the MII/IIN and check digit rules are not random ?

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#94

Post by unityByFreedom »

bmitc wrote: post #52

That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud. I think it really highlights the simple joy that technology that literally just works can bring. I'm around the same age as the author, a little younger in fact, but there's just something about today's Internet and a lot of the overwhelming amount of technology that just isn't fun or memorable. Fr…

> That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud.

That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#95

Post by [deleted] »

Aloha wrote: post #90
Animats wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the 1950s mic and speakers, it was substantially better than a smartphone. The Western Electric model 1500 [1], from 1963, is generally considered the best analog phone [1]. This was rented, not sold, so it is extremely reliable and rugged. Best audio quality was with ISDN phones. Digital end to end, synchronized at the bit level, no noise, no dropouts. [1] http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/we/we1500.html

I'm not sure why you picked a 1500 as the best sounding, the 500, 1500 and 2500 all used the same network, receiver, and transmitter elements - I've used all three, they perform identically, the 1500 set is actually incredibly rare - touch tone was just not common until the 2500 was out. The best speakerphone ever made (even better than modern ones) is a 4A Speakerphone. Also in my opinion, an AE 80 with a non cohere…

[deleted]

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#97

Post by shaky-carrousel »

marzetti wrote: post #83

Thanks for this article and the comments. Reminds me of a trick we kids did in the early 60s (yeah, sorry) with the British 'phone box' pay phones. We called it 'tapping the phone', but it wasn't spy style listening. Passed from kid to kid the amazing trick was you could dial the number by tapping the handset (10 taps for zero, 9 taps for 9, ..) and the phone would ring the number but you didn't then have to 'press b…

When I was a kid, we had a trick here in Spain to make free calls in public pay phones. When the other person answered, you had to hang up, wait about half a second and then pick up the phone. The head piece was in a lever, so you had to manipulate that lever. The further the call recipient, the longer you had to wait to pick up. For a person 50 kms away you had to wait a bit over a second, if I recall correctly.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#98

Post by [deleted] »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #14
hayleox wrote: post #8

I did really enjoy this post, but is it just a tiny bit weird how casual he is about repeatedly committing fraud? Not asking for some grand apology (lord knows the crap I did as a kid), but the post is written like defrauding an ISP is just a normal and fine thing to do. Am I off base here?

What you ever see 'hackers'? The 90s were cavalier. We're talking over 20 years ago, different time. The big difference was that people were... for lack of a better designation, intensely naive back then. There just wasn't a lot of understanding around consequences.

[deleted]

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#99

Post by julianbuse »

bschne wrote: post #77

My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest „toys“ I ever got as a kid.

that's incredibly cool!

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#100

Post by slazaro »

I was just analizing the Luhn algorithm and... the step to reverse the digits doesn't seem to do anything, right? None of the other steps depend on it and in the end you just sum all of the digits together... Is it because the amount of initial digits might not have the same parity and therefore you'd sum a different set of digits depending on whether you reverse or not?
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