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I’m not usually nostalgic, but I love everything about that phone line simulator. The case, the dip switches, the font, the model number DLE-200B. Brings back memories of a time long past.
I’d try to make one myself if I wasn’t so good at killing hardware.
Standing next to the phone talking to friends was strangely fun and nostalgic experience, despite the fact I had only used a payphone once in my life. I got a cellphone very quickly (perks of having a tech journalist in the family), so by the time I was old enough to be able to buy a phone card with my own money I no longer needed it. During the pandemic, all of the remaining phonebooths in the country were quietly shut down and dismantled.
I know it's completely irrational, but I'm still sad that I had to eventually return the one I worked on and that in the many years the system was still operational it never occurred to me to buy a card and call someone from a phone booth just for the fun of it.
P.S.: If anyone from Slovenia or other ex-Yu countries has any ideas how I could get my hands on one of those Iskra payphones, drop me an email (address in bio). I have so many ideas for projects involving them, but it seems that I'm a bit too late to stand behind the Telekom dumpster and snag a few before they're scrapped.
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…
Very true. The old-fashioned telephone handset was a masterpiece of human engineering. I bet with state-of-the-art mic and speakers, it would still be way better than a smartphone for actual phone calls. Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.
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…
It was simple and therefore easier to tamper and play with. Also, because it was so simple, more knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanisms was required to use the technology. In the early years of the internet, simply operating a computer and exploring the web was an adventure in itself!
Now, things have gotten plenty complicated and that complexity brings bugs and makes the technology impenetrable to the common folk even with an educated mind - you need to be an expert now. If it's too complex, you can't play with it, and if you can't play with it, you don't learn and you don't have fun.
I feel that your conclusion, 'it just worked', is more a consequence of the increase in complexity rather than a root cause in itself.
> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911.
Five year old girls calling 911 has saved a lot of lives. I just listened to a whole podcast series about that.
Just last month I got the opportunity to assist with an art installation that involved a phonebooth, which meant I got to take one home and poke around its insides. It was some of the most delightfully 90s tech I've seen in a while - 2-layer PCBs, all through-hole components, only a few well-known ICs... I ended up carefully removing all the "brains" and hooking up the insides to a raspberry pi, which could join a Di…
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Very true. The old-fashioned telephone handset was a masterpiece of human engineering. I bet with state-of-the-art mic and speakers, it would still be way better than a smartphone for actual phone calls. Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.
The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior in sound quality to anything you'd find in a cheap phone these days. I hooked one up to Discord last month for an art instalation and could not believe my ears when it sounded way better than the 3 other people in the call using flagship smartphones.
I understand the anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) and anti-authority attitudes of hacker culture but these stories are not told by anarchist cyberpunks "sticking it to the man" but almost invariably by sheltered (usually WASP) yuppies working for billion dollar companies or in this case, Slack.
These aren't so much stories about clever hacks and youthful rebellion but of a youth isolated from consequences for criminal offenses that would otherwise have been sufficient to give them a career-ending criminal record.
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?
You must be Gen-Z or younger. Small-time "fraud" antics like this were part of the hacker ethos throughout the 80s and 90s, some highlights being the Anarchist Cookbook, Matthew Broderick changing school records in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Kevin Mitnick as one of the notable poster children of the new era of cyber enforcement crackdowns. Even the word "hacker" meant something a lot different than today where kid…
Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall and criminal prosecution of credit card fraud and computer crimes has become a lot more effective but there's a tangible difference between generating fake credit card numbers and masking your identity to defraud ISPs and hacking the Pentagon to access government secrets (namely, the latter fits into the hacker ethos of "liberating information" and rejecting authority whereas the former just provides personal gain). Changing your school records as a student is a childish version of the latter (as the intent is not to create false credentials for monetary gain but to defy the authority of teachers by subverting their means of "punishment").
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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 ?
So if you have fourteen digits, one of which is a check digit and up to six of which are non-random, that leaves only seven truly random digits per issuer, i.e. a pool of 10'000'000 (10^7) numbers rather than the 1'000'000'000'000 (10^12) possible numbers claimed elsewhere.
Of course the actual pool is different as the number of fixed digits seems to vary per issuer and for some it seems to be only one.