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Installing a payphone in my house

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Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#221

Post by soheil »

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…

> "better" technology that doesn't work well

That's a very crude way of saying it and I 100% agree. The digital revolution promised to make analog world more precise, but we ended up having so much complexity as a result and the benefits gained by precision at low level is replaced by ever increasing chaos at high level. We seem to think having many things rendered simultaneously and faster are inherently so good not just for things like games that we built frameworks like React that run big parts of the web.

It's as if we decided increasing entropy isn't so bad after all.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#222

Post by post_break »

willcodeforfoo wrote: post #210
karmelapple wrote: post #147

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 code…

I don't remember the leave-a-message one, but I do remember the dial in service. One day I went down to the local library and found an old phone book from the 90s and sure enough, it had all the codes. Here are some photos from the Toledo, OH Ameritech 1996-7 phone book if anyone else is curious: https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/m…

Funny seeing Jerry Anderson, only to google him and see he stepped down 4 years ago. I wonder if our number was in that book.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#223

Post by asveikau »

somesomething wrote: post #194
300bps wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait Welcome to the 21st century! One of the 20th century's main themes was humans having to learn how to live in a world of infinite sugar, fat and salt. Here in the 21st century, we have to learn how to live in a world of infinite information. What will you do with your attention today? Will you consume the mental equivalent of broccoli or snickers bars?

damn... this hit harder than it should. Sometimes I need to hear the obvious.

I like the metaphor too but also so much of society hasn't figured out the sugar thing either.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#224

Post by [deleted] »

barbs wrote: post #81

I always found it interesting that payphones could receive calls in America. Australian payphones can't receive calls (at least, not to my knowledge), and it always seemed like it would be ripe for abuse if they could.

[deleted]

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#225

Post by runjake »

eternityforest wrote: post #152
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…

I think the technology itself is 100x better in just about every way(Except for pure novelty, smartphones largely killed true gadgets) The lack of fun, to me, is mostly because of how everything changed around it. I can make a basic website now, no problem, everything is easier than it was aside from the fact we pretty much have to have HTTPS. But, nobody will read it, because it will be lost in a sea of clickbait. I…

For those of us who still embrace RSS and try to avoid the clickbait and social media, please create a basic website. The more of those basic sites we have, the more people will avoid social media to some extent.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#226

Post by wolfgang42 »

lstamour wrote: post #108
wolfgang42 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a ( very old, by now) Henry Morgan sketch I remember about an expensive long distance call: after an interminable series of dings and bongs, the operator admits that she lost count and has to return the coins so he can try again. (Once they straighten out the funds, there’s a series of about six different operators needed to get the call across the country; all talking to, over, and past each other. “Hello, H…

Track 11 at https://archive.org/details/lp_the-best-of-henry-morgan-exce... Quite funny! :)

Thanks! I tried finding a link, but your search-fu is apparently better than mine :-)

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#227

Post by retrac »

barbs wrote: post #81

I always found it interesting that payphones could receive calls in America. Australian payphones can't receive calls (at least, not to my knowledge), and it always seemed like it would be ripe for abuse if they could.

It made sense originally. Most people did not originally have telephones at home. It skewed towards businesses, and then public venues like hotels. Almost immediately, a secondary business started up around each telephone. A grocery store, for example, might let customers place outgoing calls for a small fee, and reserve slots for incoming calls, and take messages. A single phone might be installed on the ground floor of an apartment building, and one of the retirees became the building phone operator.

As you might imagine, a lot of free outgoing calls were snuck in. Just pick it up when the clerk isn't looking. And no one wants to sit around all day guarding the phone, anyway. And so payphones. In those environments, you'd want them to be able to receive calls at a pre-arranged time, as well as place them. And it just kinda carried forward. But many regions in North America did start prohibiting incoming calls on payphones eventually. You couldn't do that in the 90s where I grew up in Canada.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#228

Post by alamortsubite »

stavros wrote: post #217
alamortsubite wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't worked with the Arduino. Would it be difficult to incorporate an SPDT relay to switch the sound source between it and the modem?

Hmm, probably not, actually, that's a good idea. It was one of my first projects, so I didn't really know what I was doing, which limited how much I could do.

It's a great project! Thanks for sharing it.

If the relay works you could also simulate the pulse dialing signals with clicking audio on the dial return.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#229

Post by criddell »

WalterBright wrote: post #117
franga2000 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing has not improved one iota in the 30 years I've had a cell phone - the voice quality.

The bitrate can be way higher, but the latency is often much worse these days. It's high enough on most calls that I just don't like talking on the phone anymore and I think it's because of the latency.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#230

Post by kurisufag »

hnbad wrote: post #119
dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic, though. Likewise a lot of 80s movies happily depict "funny" antics that would even at the time have been considered sexual assault or rape if the perps weren't wealthy white college "boys". Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall and criminal prosecution of credit card fraud and computer crim…

>Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white)

this could not possibly be further from the truth -- the early hacking/phreaking scene was quite possibly one of the most diverse in tech history, mostly because it was actually meritocratic

even the population of kids that hung out on IRC during early web2.0 DDoSing each other and trading 0days had a disproportionate amount of minority individuals, and large portions of them graduated to today's cybsec industry

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