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Installing a payphone in my house

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Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#141

Post by wildmanx »

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…

> 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.

That's right -- modern age stuff isn't as _hackable_. Especially not at the hardware level. You get an Alexa or a mobile phone or a camera, it's all just a chip on a PCB in a plastic case, not intended to be fiddled with by anybody (not the owner, not some repair show, literally _nobody_) just to be thrown away after a year or two and replaced by a new one.

It's all very sad. There is still some software component to things that's hackable, but even that's harder to do. In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world. Unless daddy/mommy gave them a Linux box, then the story is different.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#142

Post by slyall »

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…

A friend of mine had a system for getting free calls from New Zealand payphones.

He installed a small switch between the payphone and the line before it went into the ground. He then exploited the lack of coordination between the phone and the exchange.

* First he would pick up the phone and start dialing 0800 (equivalent of 1-800), the phone would see this was a free number and ignore what was being entered next.

* Then he would briefly interrupt the line. The phone wouldn't notice but the exchange would think the call had ended.

* Then he would dial a new number. The exchange would think the payphone was making sure he paid, while the payphone would think he was still dialing a free number.

So to call 0900 123 456 for free he would dial 0800-click-0900123456

Obviously the phone company audits quickly turned up a problem but he got away with it for a little while.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#143

Post by andylynch »

b112 wrote: post #134
franga2000 wrote: post #112

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…

Seems weird, to me, that you would need a card. Every phone booth I've used took dimes, then quarters. Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco card. I presume you could buy the cards back in the day, anywhere and easily?

Not sure where GP was, but in NZ which I think was fairly typical, pay phone cards were introduced in 1989 - you could buy them at nearly any corner shop. I think the big advantages were coin collectors no longer being necessary (they were a huge overhead!), and vandalism to steal the coins being no more.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#144

Post by pvitz »

b112 wrote: post #134
franga2000 wrote: post #112

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…

Seems weird, to me, that you would need a card. Every phone booth I've used took dimes, then quarters. Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco card. I presume you could buy the cards back in the day, anywhere and easily?

In Austria at least, this was quite common. I remember that the phone booth in our school only accepted a phone card and almost every pupil had one for emergency cases. You could buy them easily in magazine shops.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#145

Post by avg_dev »

hibbelig wrote: post #87
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?

I once made a call from a pay phone and after I was done it rang. I picked up. A very nice lady told me I had not paid enough and whether I could please put in another quarter or whatever. That was an interesting experience. In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated, especially the count the money part.

You can't leave us in suspense, we need to know whether you coughed up the dough or not.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#146

Post by bombcar »

AlbertCory wrote: post #62
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…

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 low latency with a completely analog phone call is amazing. We forget it but it was really really low.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#147

Post by karmelapple »

Does anyone remember a red phone book marketed as the “talking phone book?”

In my town in the 1990s, it had the unique feature of a free local number you could dial and use to play games, get movie showtimes, find out the time, and more. It was almost like audio-only webpages you pulled up with a four digit code after initially dialing a regular phone number. I would spend lots of time on there, typing in random codes to see if I could find an Easter egg. And I did.

I found a code - I think it may have been 9876 - that opened up a service where you could leave a short message that the next person could hear. Frequently it was nothing much, but sometimes it was … pretty strange, sometimes pretty entertaining.

Did anyone else stumble upon this strange corner of phone service, where you left a recording for strangers, and listened to what they left?

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#149

Post by brk »

jjeaff wrote: post #37
Mobil1 wrote: post #28

I found that if you had 2 adjacent pay phones you could make free calls by inverting the 2 handsets and placing the call on one phone, but putting your money in the other so the sound of the money dropping would make the operator think that you had paid for your call. Your money would be returned to you when you hung up the second phone.

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?

No, there were tones that the phone sent for each coin value. IIRC they were fairly brief and somewhat "blippy", unlike the flat DTMF tones. Back in the day you could build a Red Box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)) that would simulate these tones.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#150

Post by the_arun »

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…

Today, we take internet for granted!
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