4 ms·

One of my first electronics projects was modifying a Radio Shack tone dialer into a "red box." It was too late for it to work on most payphones but I actually

• robk 11y ago
  I did the same thing in high school. The best I could figure out was to call my dad at work which at least was considered "long distance" despite being only 50 miles away. I do not miss the old Bell pricing model.
  • VLM 11y ago
    For the benefit of our foreign readers, most Americans thought our addressing scheme was coincident with our billing scheme, but it definitely was not. We addressed phones and routed calls via area codes, but billed based on LATA. In practice if most of your calls were either across the country or across the neighborhood it didn't matter, but in the last days of BBSes being popular due to massive weirdness in the billing models it was often cheaper to call a BBS across the country than to call a BBS in your LATA but outside the local area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_are... It had its strange charm as sort of a logic puzzle.
  • technofiend 11y ago
    Had a friend nail up a dual-channel ISDN connection 24 hours, 7 days a week for over a month after very carefully determining with his local carrier that it was considered close enough not to trigger call metering. Unfortunately the billing department didn't get the memo and he ended up with a 50k bill from AT & T. I don't miss those days, either, mate.