Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes • Hacker News Board

Re: Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes

#11

Post by dbarlett » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 1:06 AM UTC

L_Rahman wrote: post #4

unimpressive wrote: post #2

This is the personal site of Evan Doorbell, who was one of the big phone phreaks in the 70's along with people like Mark Bernay. He recorded all the old telephone sounds and put them into different series where he explains how the old telephone system worked. His "How Bell Became a Phreaker" tapes are where I first encountered the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning." and it's still one of my favorit…

Any other recommendations in the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning"?

Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/...

Re: Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes

#12

Post by lessnonymous » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 2:17 AM UTC

L_Rahman wrote: post #4

unimpressive wrote: post #2

This is the personal site of Evan Doorbell, who was one of the big phone phreaks in the 70's along with people like Mark Bernay. He recorded all the old telephone sounds and put them into different series where he explains how the old telephone system worked. His "How Bell Became a Phreaker" tapes are where I first encountered the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning." and it's still one of my favorit…

Any other recommendations in the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning"?

I'd probably include The Eudaemonic Pie in the list -- depending on how define 'hacker'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie

Re: Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes

#13

Post by damian2000 » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 3:19 AM UTC

L_Rahman wrote: post #4

unimpressive wrote: post #2

This is the personal site of Evan Doorbell, who was one of the big phone phreaks in the 70's along with people like Mark Bernay. He recorded all the old telephone sounds and put them into different series where he explains how the old telephone system worked. His "How Bell Became a Phreaker" tapes are where I first encountered the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning." and it's still one of my favorit…

Any other recommendations in the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning"?

I found "Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick and "Kingpin" by Kevin Poulsen to be decent reads.

Re: Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes

#14

Post by Animats » Thu, Oct 16, 2014, 7:47 AM UTC

If you're building fault-tolerant systems, understanding how #5 Crossbar worked is still worthwhile. That was the peak of electromechanical telephony, and understanding how it dealt with faults is valuable. There are multiple resources available for almost everything - originating registers (which receive dial pulses), senders (which forward call info to other exchanges), markers (the brains of the system, with two self-checking halves), and specialized resources such as trouble recorders and billing punches. As a call progresses, resources are "seized" for a short period, then released. Resource seizure normally rotates through the resource or is random, for load balancing.

If something goes wrong, there's one retry, with different resources than the first time around. Then the call is abandoned. If the failure rate is 1% per attempt (remember, this is all done with electromechanical relays), the failure rate on two tries is 0.01%. Retry after two failures probably has a cause other than a transient error, and results in seizure of a trouble recorder, which dumps the state of the call into a specialized punched card.

In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical exchange was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. This record was not maintained in the computer era.