15 ms·

ATDT relief

524 points by discreditable 8y ago

codewritinfool 8y ago
Oh man, this reminds me of a time that I got into trouble. We had a phone system (Isotech 228, IIRC) that had these boxes call OPXIs that let standard telephone equipment connect to the phone system. They provided talk battery and ring voltage. We had a modem tied to an OPXI, which required that our dial strings in Telit (remember that? I liked it better than Procomm) start with "91,", which was 9 for an outside trunk, then 1 to select a trunk, then a comma for a pause. Then the phone number of the BBS site. The OPXI messed with the newer modem speeds. One Friday I decided that we didn't really need the OPXI if I bridged the modem with the fax line, so I did. I didn't tell anyone. That was a mistake. Monday morning I showed up for work and my boss (the chief engineer and president) called me into his office. Uh oh. He said, "Did you remove the OPXI from the modem line in the lab?" "Yes." "Why?" "Because we didn't need it." He then told me about how he came in on Saturday, finished up some PCB artwork and went to dial into the board fabricator's BBS to upload the files (long distance), and kept getting failures to connect. He tried it a bunch of times before he heard banging on the front door. He went to the front and there were multiple police officers outside. They said there were multiple 911 hangups from this location and wanted to know why. He swore that he was the only one there and there were no 911 calls. They then wanted to come in and look around the building, so he let them. After they left, he put it all together. The dial strings were set up to dial 91,1-areacode-phonenumber which dialed 911 emergency without the OPXI in the path. He verified that the OPXI was no longer in the loop and was ticked off. He knew immediately who did it. He said, "Things you do to systems other people use can have unintended consequences. Please think those things completely through in the future." Good advice, and I still hear his voice in my head today when I'm reconfiguring something.
- FooHentai 8y ago
  Ouch. So this would have worked correctly if you had also removed the '91,' from the dial string within Telit?
  - codewritinfool 8y ago
    Yes.
- phkahler 8y ago
  Worked at a small regional telco in the 90's. Many of our customers were in the 810 area code and one day a minor change was made in the call records they read into the billing system. It started interpreting 81 as a country code and tried to bill people for calling Japan. Fortunately IIRC this was caught before the bills went out.
- AceJohnny2 8y ago
  > He said, "Things you do to systems other people use can have unintended consequences. Please think those things completely through in the future." Sounds like you had a good boss. I expected the story to end with you getting fired. My current boss is like yours, which is why I joined the team.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  I think you meant 'Telix', not 'Telit'.
  - codewritinfool 8y ago
    Yes! Thank you. I've worked with Telit devices recently (which also have an AT command set) and my brain got it wrong.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      I have this substitution issue with some regularity, very frustrating. Last Friday I sent out an 'all hands' for our company with info on the job for the week of the 10th of September... even did it wrong twice in one mail.
- danielvf 8y ago
  Once as a kid, staying at a hotel, I tried to call some family staying in Room 117. For whatever reason, the call didn't go through. I glanced again at the instructions on the phone, which said "please dial a 9, then your number". So I did. The police showed up fifteen minutes later. And while "9" is a bad special prefix, the "91" in your story has to be the worst possible in the US.
  - loeg 8y ago
    > And while "9" is a bad special prefix, the "91" in your story has to be the worst possible in the US. Possibly the only worse prefix would just be straight-up "911." 91- is just unimaginably dumb.
    - chrisswanda 8y ago
      Our building once leased out a portion to a call center based in India. India's country code is "91" and to get out on the PBX was "9". But this old junky Nortel system would outpluse immediately when it saw the dial string "911". So when ever someone would try to dial "9911XXXXXXXX" it would immediately outpulse to our local PD when the dialed digits equaled 911. And whenever the outbound caller heard the PD pickup, they would get scared and just hangup. Ugh. Those were good times.
  - itronitron 8y ago
    Yep, I misdialed a friend's number once and hung up before completing the seven digits, then mistakenly let my parents answer the phone when we got the call back a few seconds later. Needless to say my parents were pissed and chose to believe that I was pranking rather than accept that I was simply an idiot.
- larrik 8y ago
  "One Friday" has never been the start of a good work story ;)
  - yesbabyyes 8y ago
    Wait, you mean that in `git push -f`, the `-f` is not the Friday flag?
    - hugodahl 8y ago
      Of course not. "Friday" isn't universal. Clearly, `-f` is the "Finally" flag
- pixl97 8y ago
  And this is why 9 is a terrible default for PBX systems. Hell, it probably was the default before 911 came into wide use.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    I think that's the most important lesson that people should learn. If a huge number of calls all start with "91" then something has already gone terribly wrong.
- flyinghamster 8y ago
  That reminds me of my younger days in Champaign-Urbana, which had a hopping BBS scene in the 1980s. I had a FidoNet node and I was going to make a file request from a BBS in Québec. I queued the file request, went to sleep... and was awakened by the sound of cops bashing on my apartment door at about 2 AM. At the time, E911 wasn't a thing, and the local PD had the number 333-8911. Guess what the local number was for the BBS? I had FUBARed my nodelist processor configuration, and it was stripping off the 1-819- [I think it was 819]. Oooops. Needless to say, the node didn't get restarted until I fixed the problem.
- loeg 8y ago
  Maybe he should have been mad at whatever asshole decided to put the first 2 of 3 digits of 911 in the dialout code, jeez.
- jedberg 8y ago
  Where I grew up in LA, one of the local exchanges started with 991. I had a lot of friends with 991 numbers, and in fact, our second line, for our modem, was also a 991 number. There were a lot of misdialed 911 calls in our area.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  this kind of thing is why pbx callout prefix is normally 7 these days, instead of 9.
notacoward 8y ago
Makes me wonder how many modems are still sitting in some company's closet, forgotten but still hooked up and able to be used if you know the right tricks.
- Aloha 8y ago
  Judging by what I've seen - many. My company still uses modems for some things, we have devices that are configured via serial, they can act as a primitive getty, enough to do modem control anyhow - and so we dial in.
- moj 8y ago
  Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!). It's quite interesting how the command set has been extended for modern needs, for example see: https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATCommands_%28UBX-13002752%29.pdf https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATComm...
  - tbodt 8y ago
    And they are an attack vector: https://atcommands.org https://atcommands.org
    - 3chelon 8y ago
      Yes, it was used to jailbreak some of the early iPhone models.
      - moj 8y ago
        > jailbreak [...] iPhone Also used in voting machines which "aren't connected to the internet" (!) e.g. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-modems-truly-divorced-from-the-internet/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-... Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary. see: https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_note_v1.01.pdf https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_n...
ghouse 8y ago
I read ATDT -- thought "Oh, the Hayes command to dial - wonder what it means now." Great story. Good memories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set
- jetrink 8y ago
  That command set is still in use! I was working with it just last week to control an LTE module.
  - illegalsmile 8y ago
    Absolutely! While it's not my preferred method of control, you can send AT commands encapsulated in SMS to update/troubleshoot BGAN terminals.
  - jpm_sd 8y ago
    Iridium modems use it too!
    - clort 8y ago
      Its embedded into GSM modules; Phones need it to do anything, to check firmware versions, to send and retreive SMS messages, to make calls etc. I used it to control the 3G dongle I had (basically, a GSM module in a stick). Most times the device will act as a serial device.
  - askvictor 8y ago
    Also used in the esp8266 when it's configured in wifi-serial mode.
  - pooppaint 8y ago
    At commands are used for many nonmodem things too.. Bluetooth adapters, zigbee adapters, HC12 transceiver, other various proprietary devices tied to a UART in addition to LTE, GSM/GPRS (I guess technically some of those are modems but they’re pretty far removed from the original design)
tyingq 8y ago
We used to use modems for almost everything. I even contributed a small piece of code to the kermit project a long time ago, maybe 1989 or so? A kermit script could have made this easier to do with 2 keystrokes... http://www.kermitproject.org/ http://www.kermitproject.org/
gfodor 8y ago
Who else went through this: "Star Wars? no that's not right" "Modems? no nobody writes about those anymore" <click>
noahmbarr 8y ago
Why not be honest and direct?
- codezero 8y ago
  Women in the industry are often punished for this.
  - arama471 8y ago
    > Somehow, I was not the usual target of this person's attentions. Unfortunately, my neighbor and friend was. He'd get the brunt of the blather and had no way out of it. Of course, the guy could also be punished for the same behavior
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    I honestly don't think this is unique to women / I wonder if this isn't one of those stereotypes foisted on them. The coworker (who was the target) in her story is male. I'm male, and I've had this very problem with male coworkers. (And nothing about this has ever struck me as having anything to do with sex or gender. As it is, most of my coworkers are male, so it's probably more a reflection of that than anything else.) And to the parent's point of "why not be honest and direct?", at the point at which such things are being written… honesty and directness have been tried, and have already failed. Some people, even told bluntly "Sorry, I need to get some work done." will keep on…
- tyingq 8y ago
  Potential consequences, or perceived consequences, or just social anxiety.
- g051051 8y ago
  Because it doesn't always work. I had someone try to get me fired because she came into my office and said "do you have a minute?" and I said (because I was legitimately busy with something important) "No". She was enraged that I didn't drop everything I was doing to listen to whatever problem she had, and went to complain to my manager, blithering about rudeness, and me not being a "team player". Since my manger was the one who had assigned me the important work, he told her in polite manager-speak that I had done the right thing and that she should try again later if she still needed my help.
heywire 8y ago
> the blathering would start, I'd look over, he'd nod, I'd do the phone trick, and then it would be over. A coworker and I had a similar arrangement at the last office I worked at :)
- mabbo 8y ago
  I live in fear that I am that person.
  - le-mark 8y ago
    Used to work with a guy who was similarly boarish and oblivious, he'd comment on his email to the entire office, every damn morning. Interesting wikipedia minutia? Whole office. I quit in large part to get away from this person.
    - giggles_giggles 8y ago
      I do this sort of thing compulsively (announce minutia to the poor souls trying to work around me) and then feel incredible shame about it later. For me it's probably related to my ADHD, since that's an impulse/executive control disorder, so this behavior matches the pattern of being unable to resist the impulse, and then later I feel anxious/guilty/embarrassed about it. It'd be a lot easier to manage if I had an office with a door, or even a cubicle. I might try to get a remote job so I don't have this problem. I feel terrible about it but can't seem to quit. I must be so annoying to my coworkers, who I quite like. Maybe I'm starved for social interaction. I'd like to say sorry to you for your coworker on behalf of all of those like us.
      - samirm 8y ago
        Have you confirmed that it's related to your "ADHD" and you're not just inconsiderate and annoying? Not trying to sound like a douche, but honestly just putting on some headphones would probably stop this supposed "executive control disorder".
lcuff 8y ago
Back in the day when I actually had an office a guy from across the hall would come and lean on the door jamb and talk at me, endlessly if I let him. Mostly cynically about the company. I came up with my solution: After a couple of sentences I would just look back at my computer and start typing, and not respond. He'd go back to his office and play Tetris.
- sethrin 8y ago
  My mother has always suggested being "busy", with as little specificity as possible. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm not available." The nice thing about this excuse is that it doesn't wear out: one can always be "too busy".
Zelphyr 8y ago
Boy, talk about memories. My fondest one is when we finally got a Western Telematic console server I could dial into from home to troubleshoot a down server. This instead of having to get up when the pager wouldn't stop beeping at 3am, drive half an hour to the datacenter (I use that term loosely--it was an office in a run-down office building), unplug and then plug back in the server, check that yep it's back up and running, and then drive the half hour back home. I don't recall the details but it seems like that WTI console server used Hayes commands somehow.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  We're definitely spoiled now. However, I feel like there's so many more things which "page" these days, and less tolerance for downtime. Did you track "4-nine" uptimes back in the day?
  - Zelphyr 8y ago
    This was such early days in web hosting that nobody thought that was an option. It was a little like the early days of Twitter where you just assumed the web site would be down as often as not.
zaat 8y ago
My own private ATDT relief was the day our phone company upgraded their systems and I could finally start using ATDT instead of ATDP, making the dial time so much shorter and significantly raising the chance to be the first dialer when someone finally logged off from any of the heavy loaded BBS lines from the redialing list. Communications was really sucks, but we were lucky enoguh not to know it back then.
- gregmac 8y ago
  I remember always tuning the DTMF timings (duration/spacing) to make the dialing as fast as the phone company could reliably allow. Even to this day when I hear the DTMF tones playing at the default speed, it pains me and makes me want to go adjust the dial command (ATDT) to speed things up.
  - raldi 8y ago
    I did this! I also had a USR Courier with a button on the front that could be reprogrammed to do anything. I reprogrammed it to dial my favorite BBS, so I could turn on the computer, press the button, and by the time AUTOEXEC.BAT had finished and Telix was launched, I'd already be connected.
  - moj 8y ago
    ATS11=50? 25? Yes, I think I typed that before every dial.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Imagine being stuck on pulse dialing and waiting in silence hoping the other side picks up.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I kinda miss the little "winking" noises the modem relay would make when it dialed. It was kinda soothing.
  - sailfast 8y ago
edoo 8y ago
That is a funny story. I used to dial into BBS' with modem commands. You could learn the screech patterns pretty well to know if something goofed before the computer did. Modem command sets are still quite prolific and if you ever mess with a M2M LTE module you will be right back in it.
- 3chelon 8y ago
  I can still hear the screech pattern in my head, and I know exactly what you mean about knowing before the computer. There was short repeating pattern and if it repeated too many times (more than about twice IIRC) then the game was up, time to redial.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Iridium satellite phones and embedded modems use a very thoroughly documented AT command set.
colin_fraizer 8y ago
I used to have the same problem. I solved it this way: 1. I set things up so I could trigger my "time-savior" with a few keystrokes. 2. At start, it would pause for a short, variable time. [During that time, I would keep my hands away from the keyboard and my attention raptly dedicated to my torturer.] 3. After the pause, the system would call MY desk phone. 4. I would sadly explain, "Oh, sorry to cut this short,but I really have to take this important work call…"
jstewartmobile 8y ago
Nice try. Totally outclassed by smack-my-bitch-up.sh though https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts/blob/master/README....
wiredfool 8y ago
+++ ATH
rgj 8y ago
1997 : I used a text-to-email gateway and hooked it up to procmail doing a sleep 300 followed by an ATDT to my cell phone. Whenever I wanted to get out of somewhere, I went to the bathroom and texted to the gateway. 5 minutes later my cellphone rang with a “very important call” :)
tacon 8y ago
I hosted an international Mailman list that blew up on my dialup Linux box in the mid 90s. Every inbound message was expanded to a batch of thirty recipient outbound messages, for a very busy phone line. I also had busy squirrels that every few months would degrade my line, especially in the winter when the phone line boxes offered some warmth. One night I came home late to find a police car parked outside my house. The officer told me they got a 911 call from my house. They wanted to "look around", to verify that I didn't have some woman locked in my house or anything. Standard procedure, they said. I have no idea how long the police car waited for me to return. Sure enough, the dial string at the time included embedded 9-1-1 so if just the right digits were dropped, it was a 911 call.
icedchai 8y ago
This brings back some memories. I got my first modem in December, 1988, 30 years ago.. 1200 bps!
londons_explore 8y ago
Whats up with this new writing style on HN? This entire article could be summarized as "You can do ATDT 12345 to dial a phone number on a modem, and I used it for pranks round my office in the 90's." All the detail about the coworker, the social cues, etc. doesn't really add insight nor entertainment value, but pads out 1 sentence into 1 page. Journalists used to use that style when paid by the word and they didn't have much to say, but rachelbythebay isn't paid like that, so why is she writing as if she is?
- icedchai 8y ago
  The details make it more entertaining and a better read.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  It's her personal blog. She's probably writing first for herself, and second for anyone who is interested in hearing her reminisce about whatever Major Software Company she worked at. Sometimes you just wanna tell a story about a thing that happened, you know? "Me and my officemate kept on tricking this guy who endlessly droned on about how useless our specialty was."
  - uxp100 8y ago
    Yeah, it's also not a new writing style for HN, her blog posts have been popular here for quite a while.
- joebergeron 8y ago
  It's a sort of anecdote called a "story", written on someone's personal blog. I too am astounded at the lack of dry, dispassionate reporting that I've come to expect from the otherwise dour, yet gripping world, of personal blogs.
- p1necone 8y ago
  Yeah but then how would I entertain myself at work rather than actually getting stuff done?
- 8y ago
gwbas1c 8y ago
Hilarious! Even better than what I thought the link was for. I honestly thought the article was going to be about the absurdity in determining a modem configuration string. Back in the late '90s, all modems shipped in default configurations that only worked for very old configurations. They all needed to be configured to do things like hardware handshaking, and tell the computer that the other end hung up. These drove dial up BBSer's nuts, because every vendor used a different AT code just to set the modem to a normal configuration. I always wished there was something like ATmodern to standardize on.
- bwann 8y ago
  The worst were pages that compiled large numbers of random modem init strings for different modems. They just got copied around from page to page with no context as to what they did, nor why. They often wound up being worse than factory defaults.
perlgeek 8y ago
At $work, we have a command line application that initiates phone calls, but behind the scenes it uses a SOAP API to talk to the telephone server, which uses SIP to talk to the phone on the desktop. Quite a bit more overhead involved there... :)
martin1b 8y ago
Glad I'm not the only one who did that to get rid of the annoying co-worker! Ah, those days were great!
cheez 8y ago
This reminds me of when I used net send to flirt with women in the computer lab. I thought I was so cool.
chiph 8y ago
The Hayes Modem technical reference is available at Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/Hayes44012TechnicalReferenceForHayesModemUsers1993 https://archive.org/details/Hayes44012TechnicalReferenceForH... But I have an original spiral-bound paper copy - if you want it, email me and I'll send it to you. Include the Fidonet ascii-art dog in your email.
webXL 8y ago
The bad date rescue call sprang to mind. Looks like there's an updated version of this trick: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chelsea-handler-gotta-go!/id1012517766?ign-mpt=uo%3D8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chelsea-handler-gotta-go!/id...
IronWolve 8y ago
Back in the BBS days, sysops would enter chat to say they are doing maintenance and taking down the bbs. Then you would see +++ and DISCONNECTED For fun, I started coding ansi sequences, that would say the sysop entered chat, that the sysop was banning you for some really lame reason, and to never call back, then showed "+++" and disconnected, and then a lot pauses to make it look legit. I had fun creating ansi pranks. BBS and Modem days, such fun. Oh yeah. WinModems. FU.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  Conversely, Shampage was a tool much loved by sysops themselves.
anotherevan 8y ago
I still have an analogue modem attached to my PC at home. I use it with NCID to get caller ID info flashed on to my screen and TVs for incoming calls, and to dial outgoing calls from my address book. The best thing though, is the black-list to which I shunt various telemarketer, etc numbers.
scott-smith_us 8y ago
We had a bloviater guy at one company. I used to get up after ten minutes or so and go to the mail room, then call the guy in the next cube and say "this is your rescue call".
jstewartmobile 8y ago
434 Points 124 Comments 123 Is 25 mes And yet only one comment suggesting the direct approach... You'd have an easier time finding Waldo. Is this low-grade nerdery really any easier (or smarter) than just saying, "Yeah, yeah, NT is great, Unix sucks, now I've got work to do."
chrissnell 8y ago
Don't forget ATV0 (I think....memory is hazy) to set the modem speaker volume to zero (silence) before dialing. :)
macdice 8y ago
I once wrote a program to send data for free anywhere in the world, by dialing another machine and then hanging up. The remote machine's modem would say RING. With the right excruciatingly adjusted and slow timing you could send binary data insanely slowly. Start bit, then 8 data bits, maybe check bit, something like that. Let's just say it never took off. Something on the order of 0.1 baud.

524 points by discreditable 8y ago

Oh man, this reminds me of a time that I got into trouble. We had a phone system (Isotech 228, IIRC) that had these boxes call OPXIs that let standard telephone equipment connect to the phone system. They provided talk battery and ring voltage. We had a modem tied to an OPXI, which required that our dial strings in Telit (remember that? I liked it better than Procomm) start with "91,", which was 9 for an outside trunk, then 1 to select a trunk, then a comma for a pause. Then the phone number of the BBS site. The OPXI messed with the newer modem speeds. One Friday I decided that we didn't really need the OPXI if I bridged the modem with the fax line, so I did. I didn't tell anyone. That was a mistake. Monday morning I showed up for work and my boss (the chief engineer and president) called me into his office. Uh oh. He said, "Did you remove the OPXI from the modem line in the lab?" "Yes." "Why?" "Because we didn't need it." He then told me about how he came in on Saturday, finished up some PCB artwork and went to dial into the board fabricator's BBS to upload the files (long distance), and kept getting failures to connect. He tried it a bunch of times before he heard banging on the front door. He went to the front and there were multiple police officers outside. They said there were multiple 911 hangups from this location and wanted to know why. He swore that he was the only one there and there were no 911 calls. They then wanted to come in and look around the building, so he let them. After they left, he put it all together. The dial strings were set up to dial 91,1-areacode-phonenumber which dialed 911 emergency without the OPXI in the path. He verified that the OPXI was no longer in the loop and was ticked off. He knew immediately who did it. He said, "Things you do to systems other people use can have unintended consequences. Please think those things completely through in the future." Good advice, and I still hear his voice in my head today when I'm reconfiguring something.

FooHentai 8y ago
Ouch. So this would have worked correctly if you had also removed the '91,' from the dial string within Telit?
- codewritinfool 8y ago
  Yes.
phkahler 8y ago
Worked at a small regional telco in the 90's. Many of our customers were in the 810 area code and one day a minor change was made in the call records they read into the billing system. It started interpreting 81 as a country code and tried to bill people for calling Japan. Fortunately IIRC this was caught before the bills went out.
AceJohnny2 8y ago
> He said, "Things you do to systems other people use can have unintended consequences. Please think those things completely through in the future." Sounds like you had a good boss. I expected the story to end with you getting fired. My current boss is like yours, which is why I joined the team.
jacquesm 8y ago
I think you meant 'Telix', not 'Telit'.
- codewritinfool 8y ago
  Yes! Thank you. I've worked with Telit devices recently (which also have an AT command set) and my brain got it wrong.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I have this substitution issue with some regularity, very frustrating. Last Friday I sent out an 'all hands' for our company with info on the job for the week of the 10th of September... even did it wrong twice in one mail.
danielvf 8y ago
Once as a kid, staying at a hotel, I tried to call some family staying in Room 117. For whatever reason, the call didn't go through. I glanced again at the instructions on the phone, which said "please dial a 9, then your number". So I did. The police showed up fifteen minutes later. And while "9" is a bad special prefix, the "91" in your story has to be the worst possible in the US.
- loeg 8y ago
  > And while "9" is a bad special prefix, the "91" in your story has to be the worst possible in the US. Possibly the only worse prefix would just be straight-up "911." 91- is just unimaginably dumb.
  - chrisswanda 8y ago
    Our building once leased out a portion to a call center based in India. India's country code is "91" and to get out on the PBX was "9". But this old junky Nortel system would outpluse immediately when it saw the dial string "911". So when ever someone would try to dial "9911XXXXXXXX" it would immediately outpulse to our local PD when the dialed digits equaled 911. And whenever the outbound caller heard the PD pickup, they would get scared and just hangup. Ugh. Those were good times.
- itronitron 8y ago
  Yep, I misdialed a friend's number once and hung up before completing the seven digits, then mistakenly let my parents answer the phone when we got the call back a few seconds later. Needless to say my parents were pissed and chose to believe that I was pranking rather than accept that I was simply an idiot.
larrik 8y ago
"One Friday" has never been the start of a good work story ;)
- yesbabyyes 8y ago
  Wait, you mean that in `git push -f`, the `-f` is not the Friday flag?
  - hugodahl 8y ago
    Of course not. "Friday" isn't universal. Clearly, `-f` is the "Finally" flag
pixl97 8y ago
And this is why 9 is a terrible default for PBX systems. Hell, it probably was the default before 911 came into wide use.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  I think that's the most important lesson that people should learn. If a huge number of calls all start with "91" then something has already gone terribly wrong.
flyinghamster 8y ago
That reminds me of my younger days in Champaign-Urbana, which had a hopping BBS scene in the 1980s. I had a FidoNet node and I was going to make a file request from a BBS in Québec. I queued the file request, went to sleep... and was awakened by the sound of cops bashing on my apartment door at about 2 AM. At the time, E911 wasn't a thing, and the local PD had the number 333-8911. Guess what the local number was for the BBS? I had FUBARed my nodelist processor configuration, and it was stripping off the 1-819- [I think it was 819]. Oooops. Needless to say, the node didn't get restarted until I fixed the problem.
loeg 8y ago
Maybe he should have been mad at whatever asshole decided to put the first 2 of 3 digits of 911 in the dialout code, jeez.
jedberg 8y ago
Where I grew up in LA, one of the local exchanges started with 991. I had a lot of friends with 991 numbers, and in fact, our second line, for our modem, was also a 991 number. There were a lot of misdialed 911 calls in our area.
jiveturkey 8y ago
this kind of thing is why pbx callout prefix is normally 7 these days, instead of 9.

notacoward 8y ago

Makes me wonder how many modems are still sitting in some company's closet, forgotten but still hooked up and able to be used if you know the right tricks.

Aloha 8y ago
Judging by what I've seen - many. My company still uses modems for some things, we have devices that are configured via serial, they can act as a primitive getty, enough to do modem control anyhow - and so we dial in.
moj 8y ago
Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!). It's quite interesting how the command set has been extended for modern needs, for example see: https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATCommands_%28UBX-13002752%29.pdf https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATComm...
- tbodt 8y ago
  And they are an attack vector: https://atcommands.org https://atcommands.org
  - 3chelon 8y ago
    Yes, it was used to jailbreak some of the early iPhone models.
    - moj 8y ago
      > jailbreak [...] iPhone Also used in voting machines which "aren't connected to the internet" (!) e.g. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-modems-truly-divorced-from-the-internet/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-... Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary. see: https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_note_v1.01.pdf https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_n...

ghouse 8y ago

I read ATDT -- thought "Oh, the Hayes command to dial - wonder what it means now." Great story. Good memories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_command_set

jetrink 8y ago
That command set is still in use! I was working with it just last week to control an LTE module.
- illegalsmile 8y ago
  Absolutely! While it's not my preferred method of control, you can send AT commands encapsulated in SMS to update/troubleshoot BGAN terminals.
- jpm_sd 8y ago
  Iridium modems use it too!
  - clort 8y ago
    Its embedded into GSM modules; Phones need it to do anything, to check firmware versions, to send and retreive SMS messages, to make calls etc. I used it to control the 3G dongle I had (basically, a GSM module in a stick). Most times the device will act as a serial device.
- askvictor 8y ago
  Also used in the esp8266 when it's configured in wifi-serial mode.
- pooppaint 8y ago
  At commands are used for many nonmodem things too.. Bluetooth adapters, zigbee adapters, HC12 transceiver, other various proprietary devices tied to a UART in addition to LTE, GSM/GPRS (I guess technically some of those are modems but they’re pretty far removed from the original design)

tyingq 8y ago

We used to use modems for almost everything. I even contributed a small piece of code to the kermit project a long time ago, maybe 1989 or so? A kermit script could have made this easier to do with 2 keystrokes... http://www.kermitproject.org/ http://www.kermitproject.org/

gfodor 8y ago

Who else went through this: "Star Wars? no that's not right" "Modems? no nobody writes about those anymore" <click>

noahmbarr 8y ago

Why not be honest and direct?

codezero 8y ago
Women in the industry are often punished for this.
- arama471 8y ago
  > Somehow, I was not the usual target of this person's attentions. Unfortunately, my neighbor and friend was. He'd get the brunt of the blather and had no way out of it. Of course, the guy could also be punished for the same behavior
- deathanatos 8y ago
  I honestly don't think this is unique to women / I wonder if this isn't one of those stereotypes foisted on them. The coworker (who was the target) in her story is male. I'm male, and I've had this very problem with male coworkers. (And nothing about this has ever struck me as having anything to do with sex or gender. As it is, most of my coworkers are male, so it's probably more a reflection of that than anything else.) And to the parent's point of "why not be honest and direct?", at the point at which such things are being written… honesty and directness have been tried, and have already failed. Some people, even told bluntly "Sorry, I need to get some work done." will keep on…
tyingq 8y ago
Potential consequences, or perceived consequences, or just social anxiety.
g051051 8y ago
Because it doesn't always work. I had someone try to get me fired because she came into my office and said "do you have a minute?" and I said (because I was legitimately busy with something important) "No". She was enraged that I didn't drop everything I was doing to listen to whatever problem she had, and went to complain to my manager, blithering about rudeness, and me not being a "team player". Since my manger was the one who had assigned me the important work, he told her in polite manager-speak that I had done the right thing and that she should try again later if she still needed my help.

heywire 8y ago

> the blathering would start, I'd look over, he'd nod, I'd do the phone trick, and then it would be over. A coworker and I had a similar arrangement at the last office I worked at :)

mabbo 8y ago
I live in fear that I am that person.
- le-mark 8y ago
  Used to work with a guy who was similarly boarish and oblivious, he'd comment on his email to the entire office, every damn morning. Interesting wikipedia minutia? Whole office. I quit in large part to get away from this person.
  - giggles_giggles 8y ago
    I do this sort of thing compulsively (announce minutia to the poor souls trying to work around me) and then feel incredible shame about it later. For me it's probably related to my ADHD, since that's an impulse/executive control disorder, so this behavior matches the pattern of being unable to resist the impulse, and then later I feel anxious/guilty/embarrassed about it. It'd be a lot easier to manage if I had an office with a door, or even a cubicle. I might try to get a remote job so I don't have this problem. I feel terrible about it but can't seem to quit. I must be so annoying to my coworkers, who I quite like. Maybe I'm starved for social interaction. I'd like to say sorry to you for your coworker on behalf of all of those like us.
    - samirm 8y ago
      Have you confirmed that it's related to your "ADHD" and you're not just inconsiderate and annoying? Not trying to sound like a douche, but honestly just putting on some headphones would probably stop this supposed "executive control disorder".

lcuff 8y ago

Back in the day when I actually had an office a guy from across the hall would come and lean on the door jamb and talk at me, endlessly if I let him. Mostly cynically about the company. I came up with my solution: After a couple of sentences I would just look back at my computer and start typing, and not respond. He'd go back to his office and play Tetris.

sethrin 8y ago
My mother has always suggested being "busy", with as little specificity as possible. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I'm not available." The nice thing about this excuse is that it doesn't wear out: one can always be "too busy".

Zelphyr 8y ago

Boy, talk about memories. My fondest one is when we finally got a Western Telematic console server I could dial into from home to troubleshoot a down server. This instead of having to get up when the pager wouldn't stop beeping at 3am, drive half an hour to the datacenter (I use that term loosely--it was an office in a run-down office building), unplug and then plug back in the server, check that yep it's back up and running, and then drive the half hour back home. I don't recall the details but it seems like that WTI console server used Hayes commands somehow.

dev_dull 8y ago
We're definitely spoiled now. However, I feel like there's so many more things which "page" these days, and less tolerance for downtime. Did you track "4-nine" uptimes back in the day?
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  This was such early days in web hosting that nobody thought that was an option. It was a little like the early days of Twitter where you just assumed the web site would be down as often as not.

zaat 8y ago

My own private ATDT relief was the day our phone company upgraded their systems and I could finally start using ATDT instead of ATDP, making the dial time so much shorter and significantly raising the chance to be the first dialer when someone finally logged off from any of the heavy loaded BBS lines from the redialing list. Communications was really sucks, but we were lucky enoguh not to know it back then.

gregmac 8y ago
I remember always tuning the DTMF timings (duration/spacing) to make the dialing as fast as the phone company could reliably allow. Even to this day when I hear the DTMF tones playing at the default speed, it pains me and makes me want to go adjust the dial command (ATDT) to speed things up.
- raldi 8y ago
  I did this! I also had a USR Courier with a button on the front that could be reprogrammed to do anything. I reprogrammed it to dial my favorite BBS, so I could turn on the computer, press the button, and by the time AUTOEXEC.BAT had finished and Telix was launched, I'd already be connected.
- moj 8y ago
  ATS11=50? 25? Yes, I think I typed that before every dial.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Imagine being stuck on pulse dialing and waiting in silence hoping the other side picks up.
reaperducer 8y ago
I kinda miss the little "winking" noises the modem relay would make when it dialed. It was kinda soothing.
- sailfast 8y ago

edoo 8y ago

That is a funny story. I used to dial into BBS' with modem commands. You could learn the screech patterns pretty well to know if something goofed before the computer did. Modem command sets are still quite prolific and if you ever mess with a M2M LTE module you will be right back in it.

3chelon 8y ago
I can still hear the screech pattern in my head, and I know exactly what you mean about knowing before the computer. There was short repeating pattern and if it repeated too many times (more than about twice IIRC) then the game was up, time to redial.
walrus01 8y ago
Iridium satellite phones and embedded modems use a very thoroughly documented AT command set.

colin_fraizer 8y ago

I used to have the same problem. I solved it this way: 1. I set things up so I could trigger my "time-savior" with a few keystrokes. 2. At start, it would pause for a short, variable time. [During that time, I would keep my hands away from the keyboard and my attention raptly dedicated to my torturer.] 3. After the pause, the system would call MY desk phone. 4. I would sadly explain, "Oh, sorry to cut this short,but I really have to take this important work call…"

jstewartmobile 8y ago

Nice try. Totally outclassed by smack-my-bitch-up.sh though https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/NARKOZ/hacker-scripts/blob/master/README....

wiredfool 8y ago

+++ ATH

rgj 8y ago

1997 : I used a text-to-email gateway and hooked it up to procmail doing a sleep 300 followed by an ATDT to my cell phone. Whenever I wanted to get out of somewhere, I went to the bathroom and texted to the gateway. 5 minutes later my cellphone rang with a “very important call” :)

tacon 8y ago

I hosted an international Mailman list that blew up on my dialup Linux box in the mid 90s. Every inbound message was expanded to a batch of thirty recipient outbound messages, for a very busy phone line. I also had busy squirrels that every few months would degrade my line, especially in the winter when the phone line boxes offered some warmth. One night I came home late to find a police car parked outside my house. The officer told me they got a 911 call from my house. They wanted to "look around", to verify that I didn't have some woman locked in my house or anything. Standard procedure, they said. I have no idea how long the police car waited for me to return. Sure enough, the dial string at the time included embedded 9-1-1 so if just the right digits were dropped, it was a 911 call.

icedchai 8y ago

This brings back some memories. I got my first modem in December, 1988, 30 years ago.. 1200 bps!

londons_explore 8y ago

Whats up with this new writing style on HN? This entire article could be summarized as "You can do ATDT 12345 to dial a phone number on a modem, and I used it for pranks round my office in the 90's." All the detail about the coworker, the social cues, etc. doesn't really add insight nor entertainment value, but pads out 1 sentence into 1 page. Journalists used to use that style when paid by the word and they didn't have much to say, but rachelbythebay isn't paid like that, so why is she writing as if she is?

icedchai 8y ago
The details make it more entertaining and a better read.
egypturnash 8y ago
It's her personal blog. She's probably writing first for herself, and second for anyone who is interested in hearing her reminisce about whatever Major Software Company she worked at. Sometimes you just wanna tell a story about a thing that happened, you know? "Me and my officemate kept on tricking this guy who endlessly droned on about how useless our specialty was."
- uxp100 8y ago
  Yeah, it's also not a new writing style for HN, her blog posts have been popular here for quite a while.
joebergeron 8y ago
It's a sort of anecdote called a "story", written on someone's personal blog. I too am astounded at the lack of dry, dispassionate reporting that I've come to expect from the otherwise dour, yet gripping world, of personal blogs.
p1necone 8y ago
Yeah but then how would I entertain myself at work rather than actually getting stuff done?
8y ago

gwbas1c 8y ago

Hilarious! Even better than what I thought the link was for. I honestly thought the article was going to be about the absurdity in determining a modem configuration string. Back in the late '90s, all modems shipped in default configurations that only worked for very old configurations. They all needed to be configured to do things like hardware handshaking, and tell the computer that the other end hung up. These drove dial up BBSer's nuts, because every vendor used a different AT code just to set the modem to a normal configuration. I always wished there was something like ATmodern to standardize on.

bwann 8y ago
The worst were pages that compiled large numbers of random modem init strings for different modems. They just got copied around from page to page with no context as to what they did, nor why. They often wound up being worse than factory defaults.

perlgeek 8y ago

At $work, we have a command line application that initiates phone calls, but behind the scenes it uses a SOAP API to talk to the telephone server, which uses SIP to talk to the phone on the desktop. Quite a bit more overhead involved there... :)

martin1b 8y ago

Glad I'm not the only one who did that to get rid of the annoying co-worker! Ah, those days were great!

cheez 8y ago

This reminds me of when I used net send to flirt with women in the computer lab. I thought I was so cool.

chiph 8y ago

The Hayes Modem technical reference is available at Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/Hayes44012TechnicalReferenceForHayesModemUsers1993 https://archive.org/details/Hayes44012TechnicalReferenceForH... But I have an original spiral-bound paper copy - if you want it, email me and I'll send it to you. Include the Fidonet ascii-art dog in your email.

webXL 8y ago

The bad date rescue call sprang to mind. Looks like there's an updated version of this trick: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chelsea-handler-gotta-go!/id1012517766?ign-mpt=uo%3D8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chelsea-handler-gotta-go!/id...

IronWolve 8y ago

Back in the BBS days, sysops would enter chat to say they are doing maintenance and taking down the bbs. Then you would see +++ and DISCONNECTED For fun, I started coding ansi sequences, that would say the sysop entered chat, that the sysop was banning you for some really lame reason, and to never call back, then showed "+++" and disconnected, and then a lot pauses to make it look legit. I had fun creating ansi pranks. BBS and Modem days, such fun. Oh yeah. WinModems. FU.

JdeBP 8y ago
Conversely, Shampage was a tool much loved by sysops themselves.

anotherevan 8y ago

I still have an analogue modem attached to my PC at home. I use it with NCID to get caller ID info flashed on to my screen and TVs for incoming calls, and to dial outgoing calls from my address book. The best thing though, is the black-list to which I shunt various telemarketer, etc numbers.

scott-smith_us 8y ago

We had a bloviater guy at one company. I used to get up after ten minutes or so and go to the mail room, then call the guy in the next cube and say "this is your rescue call".

jstewartmobile 8y ago

434 Points 124 Comments 123 Is 25 mes And yet only one comment suggesting the direct approach... You'd have an easier time finding Waldo. Is this low-grade nerdery really any easier (or smarter) than just saying, "Yeah, yeah, NT is great, Unix sucks, now I've got work to do."

chrissnell 8y ago

Don't forget ATV0 (I think....memory is hazy) to set the modem speaker volume to zero (silence) before dialing. :)

macdice 8y ago

I once wrote a program to send data for free anywhere in the world, by dialing another machine and then hanging up. The remote machine's modem would say RING. With the right excruciatingly adjusted and slow timing you could send binary data insanely slowly. Start bit, then 8 data bits, maybe check bit, something like that. Let's just say it never took off. Something on the order of 0.1 baud.