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.
Installing a payphone in my house
81–90 of 279 posts
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#82This was a fantastic read and the end just put a smile on my face thanks for sharing.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#83Thanks 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 button A' to speak.. you simply made the call, spoke normally, hung up, and pressed button B to get your money back! Sadly, I never tried international calls...
When we moved to New Zealand around '63-4, I discovered the phone dial was reversed, in the UK it was 1-9,0, in NZ it was 9-1,0. (So emergency calls were 111 not 999 as in the UK.) The trick still worked but, except for 0, you had to '10s complement' the taps. Maybe because of that none of the kids I knew at the time in NZ appeared to know the trick...
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#84I 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?
The credit card fraud is to me the worst, as any random number might actually match an existing one, and back in the days I wouldn't expect much scrutiny from the card processor. That's then up to the poor soul who's number was used to go through paperwork purgatory to dispute the charge. Orherwise ISPs are the poster child of monopoly giants that had to be broken down kicking and screaming, but kept screwing the cus…
If every human being alive today (~8 billion) had a valid Visa card (14 digits not counting the beginning 4 and the check digit), there would be a 0.008% chance of a collision.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#85I 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.
I don't think that people were more naive, they were just young.
I am pretty sure kids today are also doing some different mildly illegal stuff with technology, but we'll have to wait 20 years to find out about it.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#86Nice article.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#87I 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?
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.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#88I 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...
There is an older project where the author hooks up a payphone to a PBX: https://github.com/jcs/payphone
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#89I 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?
The credit card fraud is to me the worst, as any random number might actually match an existing one, and back in the days I wouldn't expect much scrutiny from the card processor. That's then up to the poor soul who's number was used to go through paperwork purgatory to dispute the charge. Orherwise ISPs are the poster child of monopoly giants that had to be broken down kicking and screaming, but kept screwing the cus…
Dial-up ISPs were the poster child of anarchistic markets. If you could get a data T1 and a PRI T1 and some modems, you could run an ISP. When your PRI fills up, get another. When your data fills up, get another. Etc. A lot of those were pretty small operations (which is why the author had to get friends to call in).
There were a pretty good number of nationwide ISPs to choose from too, if you wanted something less fly by night. A whole heck of a lot of consolidation happened since then of course. But even the winners of dial-up pretty much lost to cable and baby bells. It was easy to setup a dial-up ISP, but it's darn hard to setup a broadband ISP, so we're stuck unless you can convince the FCC that the 1996 Telecom Act applies (might need some court work as well) and we can get mandatory line sharing back.
Re: Installing a payphone in my house
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 cohered up carbon mic will outperform a 500/1500/2500 on a short loop (sub 15kf), and can be tuned to outperform on a long. The self compensating network in the WE set is better however.
That all said, a modern Northern Telecom or Aastra analog phone will consistently outperform a 500 set, because of the electret mic in them. Carbon mics have benefits as an amplifier, but transistors rendered them obsolete in most cases.