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Installing a payphone in my house

1129 points by itsjloh 4y ago

esses 4y ago
Payphone.com is wondering why sales are through the roof!
ck2 4y ago
One last generation might still understand the superman jokes and "I'm going to need an exit" but 100 years from now it's definitely going to need an explainer.
- 0des 4y ago
  The matrix had phone booths in the good one. edit: not one of you asked "which one's the good one".. I rest my case.
  - ck2 4y ago
    "Too bad they never made any sequels" https://m.xkcd.com/566/ https://m.xkcd.com/566/
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    I rewatched all 3 recently, and I have to say I don't remember why I and everyone else disliked the sequels so much. They are exciting, and tell a good story. I haven't watched the new one yet.
    - jamal-kumar 4y ago
      Ever watch the newest one they made? It's like baudrillardian banality taken to its logical extreme. The first half is literally a clip show. Comes off as a shitty superhero movie of now but with matrix characters
      - hnbad 4y ago
        The movie is infinitely better if you understand it within its real world context. The Wachowskis did not want to make another Matrix movie but the studio approached them and said that they would make the movie either way but they would be given full artistic freedom if they agreed. They basically had the choice of doing this themselves or letting the studio turn it into a soulless franchise detached from their own vision. The movie is mostly an allegory for how the movie was created and why it shouldn't exist. Aside from mindless indulgence the ending is also giving a middle finger to the production company. The philosophy is dull because everything that needed to be said was already said so the only thing left to do is repeat it more blatantly for the audience in the back. That doesn't mean it's a great movie and you can argue that a movie should be enjoyable without context, but for me knowing this context allowed me to enjoy it through that lens a lot more than I probably would have had I not come into this knowing this.
        mihaic 4y ago
        My thoughts exactly. As a fan of the first Matrix, it felt a bit cathartic to see the honesty upfront, so I could just see this movie as a standalone statement with some decent visuals. It was pretty much the opposite of watching the latest Star Trek series, that have completely departed from the original philosophy.
        ck2 4y ago
        They put their name on it. They made appearances. They took a huge paycheck despite already being millionaires and not needing it. So they own it as much as the 1st 2nd or 3rd. They did not have to do that. In fact it would have been an even stronger statement if every review of the 4th started off with "done without the original creators input or approval". But now the 4th has been done with the original creators input and approval, so it's their fault, their mess. In hindsight you can now see the wonder and amazement of the first movies were not just from them but everyone that worked so hard for them, not just the actors but everyone behind the scenes, even the clever color timing, completely absent from the 4th as well as the horrible music, everyone just phoned it in for the paycheck. "Because someone else would do it if we didn't" is not a viable excuse, it would have been a statement otherwise, a path they purposely didn't chose for either ego or profit.
    - ck2 4y ago
      Do not watch the fourth. Not kidding. It's not worth the curiosity. Yes the 2nd and 3rd were great despite critics. The fourth is a "WTF who wrote this garbage money grab" the entire time, it's not even "fan service" because it destroys everything with poor writing and terrible acting, feels like someone was shouting "we'll fix it in post" after every first take rushing to the next shot to churn it out. Remember how epic the music was in the first three? The fourth is like that kid from Bob's Burgers mashing on a keyboard. Remember the epic dialog from Hugo Weaving and those chilling rants from Agent Smith? Yeah absolutely nothing, nothing even vaguely faintly like it in the fourth, it almost undoes the entire franchise.
      - jamal-kumar 4y ago
        I'm really of the opinion that they did that on purpose given the philosophical underpinnings of the original. Like, to make a point, because Warner Bros owned the rights to their franchise and were going to make some banal crap anyways, with or without the Wachowskis.
        hnbad 4y ago
        That's literally why. Also 2 and 3 were mostly bad because releasing two part movies wasn't a thing at the time and thus the films had to be forced into (unsatisfying) single-movie narrative arcs despite having an obvious overarching narrative. Re-watching 2 and 3 as a double feature years later makes them less of a trainwreck and more of a mildly underwhelming but watchable and solid sequel to a movie so good it was impossible to follow up on. It finishes the story, literally ends the universe it created and ties up the loose ends. On the other hand 4 is the sequel that never should have been but ultimately exists to seal the franchise permanently shut because any attempt to build on it can only be read as a soulless cashgrab because there is now literally nothing left to tell. WB didn't want to let its IP die so the Wachowskis had to drive a stake through its heart and kiss it goodbye.
z82s3 4y ago
I enjoyed learning about BBS door games.
newman314 4y ago
I want to do this but with a real British phone booth.
- bpye 4y ago
  Well it looks like you can buy them https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403689859315 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403689859315
  - wrboyce 4y ago
    It’s worth noting a K6 weighs in at about 1,250kg so “collect in person” is easier said than done! Personally I’d go with a specialist/approved company such as x2connect.
    - bpye 4y ago
      I didn't know x2connect existed, neat.
- parenthesis 4y ago
  Here in the UK, you see them in people's gardens sometimes: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,276.94h,87.57t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1syREsju2kY4VbYiFvnEcI3w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,27...
chrissnell 4y ago
I did this back in the early 2000s, when Asterisk first became really popular. My plan was to create an Asterisk PBX in my house and hook the payphone to that and be able to use it to receive and make VoIP calls. Unfortunately, the project never got off the ground because I bought a phone 1) without any keys to the locks and 2) without the proper software and interface cables to be able to program it. I ended up selling it again on eBay for what I paid for it.
hayleox 4y ago
I 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?
- adastra22 4y ago
  Yeah this also struck me as quite strange. Not that he did it, but that he was so cavalier about it, even after all this time.
- bluedino 4y ago
  It seems like for a while there we all did shit like that. Or at least said we did.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  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.
  - serf 4y ago
    > What you ever see 'hackers'? to be fair that movie follows a group of teenagers showcasing illegal activities that finally culminate into their federal arrest. yeah, they're later exonerated because 'Movie-FBI' has a heart and a sense of justice, but that's probably not the best movie to try to pull criminality psych from. my guess : Eric Corley injected a lot of his own personal ethos into that movie. He was apparently an unpaid consultant.
    - jamal-kumar 4y ago
      It's what people had to model their own behaviour on in a time where most depictions weren't exactly positive I guess? I'm purely speaking retrospectively here
alex_young 4y ago
I don’t know if I enjoyed the idea or the writing more, but I’m very happy I read this. Thank you.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Back when I was a kid I had alot of fun using methods to get free phone calls on these things. Like, beyond just red-boxing or whatever (Past that time). In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything that would generate them. There was all these people using hacked cards that they installed countermeasures against which were hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards would keep one foot in the doorway in case the fabled alarm would go off, i knew a guy who did this thinking naaah it would never happen to me. NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe... Literally just playing the DTMF tones into the handset would have gotten past that on every 'grey phone' out there (The ones that advertise ISDN connectivity). Wouldn't be surprised if that still works if they still have those phones anywhere. The other way I did it in another country was a telephone company test line (toll free!) which would give you 30 seconds of silence then a dial tone (presumably 'remote'). From this dial tone you could call anywhere in the world. We got some list that phonelosers used to make and called places like the president of Kenya. This guy mentions using a payphone which accepts incoming calls to get the internet as a kid in the 90s. Those which still rang on incoming were mostly gone by my time but a few were still configured to act like that. Was fun to sit down the road with a cellphone and watch people be scared to pick up the line after watching it ring for a few seconds.
- meep0l 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on the "fabled alarm?"
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    Yeah a red light would flash over the booth and the door would shut closed, hence having to put your foot in there. Alot of people buying and using these cards were like 'bullshit!' but this guy who told me about this figured to err on the side of caution anyways and ended up having to comically escape the situation with all these people looking at him. This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty hilarious nonetheless
    - 4y ago
bluedino 4y ago
Looking at that pay phone makes me think of those ancient phones your had to hand crank. Looking real old now.
daniel_iversen 4y ago
This is very cool, but I'm personally more interested in what he is using for the big digital picture frame next to his phone :)
bredren 4y ago
This was a great post with a very sweet ending. The unexpected screenshot of the LORD intro ascii art was a blast from the past.
burnt_toast 4y ago
The ending was very wholesome
Mobil1 4y ago
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.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  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?
  - nahmean 4y ago
    At one point it was. You could even record the sound on a handheld recorder and play it back. But it hasn’t worked in a long while. Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset. Edit: oh yeah, and after that, you’d just call the operator and tell them the keys were sticky and to dial the number for you, then you’d “insert the coins” by playing the tones. Well, or you just third party billed the call to someone you didn’t know. That worked too.
    - jamal-kumar 4y ago
      After this mitigation was put into place enterprising phreaks would take a lighter to the microphone part of the handset, twist it open, cut the yellow wire, and redbox away.
    - kfrzcode 4y ago
      "bobwehadthebabyitsaboy"
      - jjulius 4y ago
        Oh hey, nostalgia.
    - Slartie 4y ago
spicyramen_ 4y ago
Awesome, I used to work with Mitel PBX which have a feature called DISA which allows you to call a number and place calls from there. The number you call will give you dial tone and you could place calls anywhere I looked up the list of customers with Visa find the main number and try the first 20-100 numbers which was normally the range used (sold DIDs by Telco) during my installation I gave myself access to those via 1800 numbers so it was pretty much able to call LD/cell phone which used to be expensive before
cbhl 4y ago
I 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...
- CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
  It would be cool! You'd need FXS ports, though (those are the ones which provide the line/ring voltage). You'd also need to research how the payphone indicated coin insertion (bell/2bell/bong or something else), and how to tell the payphone to either return the coins or drop them into the box (in some cases it's an MF signal, in others it's polarity reversal of the phone line).
  - jcrawfordor 4y ago
    The PacBell branding suggests this unit hasn't been converted, but most popular payphone model have a COCOT conversion kit available. COCOTs or customer-owned-coin-operated-telephones perform the charging internally and don't require exchange support, so they're a lot simpler to get working. The conversion kits are pretty readily available because a good majority of payphones out in the world today, even operated by the incumbent telco, are actually COCOTs since they've become cheaper and easier to manage over time. Plus a lot of payphones aren't managed by the telco anymore but instead by a separate private company like PTS, which runs all COCOTs with an arrangement where they "dial in" to a management system regularly for configuration and reports. General rule of thumb is that any payphone that accepts credit cards is actually a COCOT, any payphone not branded by the ILEC is a COCOT, and a lot of the rest are COCOTs too depending on the telco. "Genuine" exchange-controlled payphones (that signal coin drops back to the exchange) have become rare. I'm pretty surprised he went with the Viking box actually because it costs more than an inexpensive FXS ATA, and a lot more than getting an ATA used. It's simpler to set up, but on the other hand some ATAs have internal logic to connect their two lines that you can enable so they behave as standalone devices. I think this is typical on the older Ciscos.
- 4y ago
doctor_eval 4y ago
I’m not usually nostalgic, but I love everything about that phone line simulator. The case, the dip switches, the font, the model number DLE-200B. Brings back memories of a time long past.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I was really hoping to find an ISDN simulator with U-interfaces but anything I could find on eBay I wasn’t going to pay for since I had no documentation on how to configure/operate them. I’d try to make one myself if I wasn’t so good at killing hardware.
- wolrah 4y ago
  Basically everything Viking makes has an old school telecom aesthetic.
- 2rsf 4y ago
  Well, it is an old timer. I spent many days with one in the mid 90's and it wasn't new even then
DeathArrow 4y ago
Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog phone to a digital phone line? I would like to make use of an ancient analog phone.
- CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
  Yup! You want an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). That's a box which takes Ethernet in, and gives you one or more FXS ports. (An FXS and an FXO port are similar, but the FXS port is the one which provides the current that powers the phone, generates the ringing signal, etc.) It's important to note that other than call routing, the ATA has to do almost everything the phone company would do. The ATA provides any Caller ID, for example. It provides call-waiting, or 3-way conferencing. If you want to use a rotary phone, you'll need one that handles pulse dialing. Your ATA will use SIP to connect to a VoIP provider. Some support using multiple SIP accounts (especially if the ATA has multiple FXS ports.
- wolrah 4y ago
  > Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog phone to a digital phone line? A VoIP analog telephone adapter (ATA) would be the most common form of this these days. Most will have two analog lines, though other configurations are available. The Sipura SPA series and it's derivatives (Linksys PAP2(T), Cisco SPA122) are popular, as well as Obihai's lineup. I've used them all extensively and they're solid. You can connect these to a SIP based VoIP provider or they can operate entirely standalone just calling port to port. With a bit of work you can even link up multiple devices on a private network IP to IP.
bmitc 4y ago
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. From game consoles to land lines to various other things, there were pieces of technology that just worked and worked well. Of course, there was technology that didn't work well, but I think part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The low latency with a completely analog phone call is amazing. We forget it but it was really really low.
    - GuB-42 4y ago
      If I remember correctly, in many cases, latency was lower than in-person talk, because of the speed of sound.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Yeah, effectively you're both whispering directly into each other's ear, which, even if possible in-person is a bit uncomfortable.
  - Animats 4y ago
cachvico 4y ago
How come the ISP didn't blacklist his address?
- CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
  I think the ISP didn't ask for an address. Back then I doubt credit card companies were doing address verification, at least for lower-value purchases. (The infrastructure probably didn't exist.)
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  This is a different era of ISP. He was not signing up to have fiber installed to his house or whatever (which was not a thing back then), he was signing up to be able to call out to an ISP's server with his modem and get on the Internet from there. So the only thing the ISP knew about him was a username, password and fake billing details, and since the ISP was presumably not a telco, they could also not tell where the call was coming from.
Ayesh 4y ago
Wow this brings back memories. I stayed at a high school hostel, and and remember calling the high school sweethearts after 9pm, when they had super cheap fares. 9 minutes for an equivalent of $0.02. There was only one phone, so the rest of the kids were in a queue waiting to call theirs. You'll get an earful if you were the one to fill the coin storage (the phone company only comes once a month or so to collect the money) or jam a coin.
zamadatix 4y ago
> > Have you ever used a payphone and thought to yourself, “That would be a great novelty idea for the pool room, family room, or office. What a conversation piece”. > Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have. This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your niche target audience.
ValtteriL 4y ago
I want a payphone to my house straight from a casino in Vegas too! Just worrying about the "seen some shit" thing: where I used to grow up, the only payphone was mostly used as a toilet by drunk people.
mrb 4y ago
I love it that he uses the payphone to talk to his daughter's phone in her room... or rather that she uses her phone to call him ;) I also just set up a private phone network in my house, and my daughter can also call my room, from her bedroom. But it spiraled very quickly into something more evolved & more fun. It all started when I discovered after buying our new house that most rooms were pre-wired with RJ11 outlets, with all the lines going to a central closet. So one day I bought a cheap 8-port PBX for $80 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MIQ12A https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MIQ12A) and bought a classic rotary phone for my daughter's room, and a regular phone for our room. The PBX needed no configuration whatsoever, it comes with the ports assigned extensions 601, 602, etc, so right away my daughter was elated she could call us from her room by just dialing "601" or whatever. It's important to note we do not have a landline; the PBX's outgoing lines were left unconnected, so it was purely a private phone network. The PBX could also be configured so it auto-dials an extension as soon as the phone is picked up. But I wanted my daughter to learn how to use a rotary dial so I didn't use that feature. As a side note, the "phone line simulator" that the OP uses is basically a minimalist 2-port PBX with no outgoing line. But I thought, how hard is it to replace the PBX with an Asterisk VOIP system? So I replaced the PBX with a $140 Analog Telphone Adapter (also 8 ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TL7N6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TL7N6), I configured the ATA to route calls via SIP to my Linux gateway, on which I installed Asterisk. I wrote a simple Asterisk config defining even shorter extensions so my daughter only has to dial "1" or "2" instead of "601" or "602". Then I set up some extensions that play recorded audio files, like songs, or sweet messages we recorded to each other. Then, later I thought it might be practical for my daughter to be able to call my cellphone (in case of emergencies or whatnot). So I searched for VOIP providers, found https://voip.ms/ https://voip.ms/ and signed up for an account. I configured Asterisk to place outgoing calls through this provider. And I defined new extensions: 3 rings my cellphone, and 4 rings my wife's cellphone, while the other extensions work just as before (eg. 1 still rings our bedroom.) But I specifically did NOT configure Asterisk to be able to place outgoing calls to arbitrary numbers. So the internal phones are only able to call my predefined extensions. And again later I thought it might be practical to be able to call her bedroom phone from my cellphone. So I added a DID number (direct inward dialing) to my voip.ms account. Then I configured Asterisk to accept incoming calls from voip.ms, then prompt for an extension, and forward the call accordingly. So when I call the number, I hear "please dial an extension", then I can type 2, and my daughter's phone rings. In order to avoid spam calls, I made Asterisk check the caller ID and accept calls coming ONLY from my cellphone or from my wife's cellphone. (I'm well aware that caller ID can be spoofed, in fact I have spoofed it myself a few times with my setup as a demonstration to family & friends.) In the 2 months since I bought the DID number I did not see a single call intercepted by my caller id filter. So it looks like I got a pretty "clean" number. I understand that I might not have been that lucky. And that's basically where I'm at today. We have a mostly private in-home phone network, that can also call our cellphones, and our cellphones only are allowed to call into the house phone system. Our daughter will call us in the morning when she wakes up to say what she wants for breakfast. When her cousins visit, they chat on the phone from room to room. It's fun! As someone who knew nothing about Asterisk, I found the official documentation utterly mediocre. The process of configuring it consisted mostly of finding real-world examples, then trying to reverse engineer them by finding what they do from the documentation. But in the end I still got everything to work exactly the way I wanted it.
bschne 4y ago
My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest „toys“ I ever got as a kid.
- julianbuse 4y ago
  that's incredibly cool!
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  In the olden days (up to about the mid-1990s!) the island of Canna off the west coast of Scotland that had a ten-subscriber phone exchange where you could dial any number on the island with a single digit. You could only make one call at a time off the island, via a VHF link on around 80MHz to the telephone exchange in Mallaig about 25 miles away.
slk500 4y ago
great, sweet story
deleted 4y ago
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barbs 4y ago
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 4y ago
  [deleted]
- retrac 4y ago
  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.
- payphonefiend 4y ago
  You can 100% call Australian payphones. Last week I stood next one in the Sydney CBD and called it, it rung - I didn't pick up. Here's a list with physical addresses and phone numbers. Enjoy. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/B15mu7h/Payphones/master/Payphones_allowing_incoming_calls https://raw.githubusercontent.com/B15mu7h/Payphones/master/P...
  - barbs 4y ago
    Username checks out! Wow, didn't know about this at all. Will be experimenting with these for sure. Thanks!
riffraff 4y ago
This was a fantastic read and the end just put a smile on my face thanks for sharing.
marzetti 4y ago
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 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...
- shaky-carrousel 4y ago
  When I was a kid, we had a trick here in Spain to make free calls in public pay phones. When the other person answered, you had to hang up, wait about half a second and then pick up the phone. The head piece was in a lever, so you had to manipulate that lever. The further the call recipient, the longer you had to wait to pick up. For a person 50 kms away you had to wait a bit over a second, if I recall correctly.
- myrryr 4y ago
  This is because the NZ answer was to use a regular land line, and dial extra numbers on the end, the exchange would work, but their billing system would throw out the call, giving it to you for free.
- blangk 4y ago
  We used to get the money back with a pretty reliable mechanical method, stuffing a flattened MacDonald's straw into the machine above the spare change slot and jiggling in and out. You needed a coin for the call but could return and re use it each time or even for the same call.
- bjelkeman-again 4y ago
  In Sweden, at the high school I went to, we had pay phones which would behave as if you had inserted a coin if you zapped it with static electricity. We used this for a while to make prank calls to other countries. Typically to random numbers we just tried, sometimes in the middle of the night in the other country.
sirius93 4y ago
Nice article.
bjarneh 4y ago
Ok, I need one of those. Very funny and well written piece... > I’m not quite ready to reap what I sow.
slazaro 4y ago
I was just analizing the Luhn algorithm and... the step to reverse the digits doesn't seem to do anything, right? None of the other steps depend on it and in the end you just sum all of the digits together... Is it because the amount of initial digits might not have the same parity and therefore you'd sum a different set of digits depending on whether you reverse or not?
- account42 4y ago
  I think it only matters for which digits you double if there are an even number of digits.
mattlondon 4y ago
I remember doing something similar to get ISP access in the early 90s. Like AOL various ISPs would be bundled into CDs/floppies and offer a free trial. One of them did not validate the card number, so you could just type in 000000000000 or whatever and your free trial was enabled for a month or whatever and then be auto cancelled when they tried to bill for your first month after the trial. In the UK though local calls were not free and charged by the minute. I think that ISP also bundled a <1.0 version of Netscape's Mozilla (0.8?) on their disk which was nice as otherwise I only had mosaic. Good times. Edit: I think the version of netscape/Mozilla was this one - I distinctly remember the "M" logo that would rotate as pages loaded slowly on a 14.4 modem: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/old-software/web-browsers/netscape-navigator/mosaic-netscape-0-9-01.png https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/old-software/web-br.... Curious that it was called "mosaic netscape" - I don't remember that.
- brk 4y ago
  When the first Palm VII's came out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII) I wanted to see how responsive the wireless connectivity was before buying one. The local Staples store had a functional demo unit, but it had no subscription. So I tried signing up with random info, when it got to entering a card number, I entered 4111 1111 1111 1111, which passes the basic validation checks for a visa (and is obviously easy to remember). The device activated immediately and I was able to try some live data transfers. It worked for about 3 days (I went back to check it out of curiosity). Presumably the activation of service happened locally in the device, or with minimal cross-checking with the backend billing service. A few months later I tried it on another unit and the number no longer worked for activation :)
tempestn 4y ago
Fun story, and that list of door games was a blast from the past. I especially recall some fun times playing Planets: TEOS, trying to whittle down the runaway leader while he was away on vacation...
sambalbadjak 4y ago
I enjoyed reading that!
RektBoy 4y ago
What do you do for living now? B & E ?
franga2000 4y ago
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 Discord channel or answer an incoming call when you picked up the phone. Standing next to the phone talking to friends was strangely fun and nostalgic experience, despite the fact I had only used a payphone once in my life. I got a cellphone very quickly (perks of having a tech journalist in the family), so by the time I was old enough to be able to buy a phone card with my own money I no longer needed it. During the pandemic, all of the remaining phonebooths in the country were quietly shut down and dismantled. I know it's completely irrational, but I'm still sad that I had to eventually return the one I worked on and that in the many years the system was still operational it never occurred to me to buy a card and call someone from a phone booth just for the fun of it. P.S.: If anyone from Slovenia or other ex-Yu countries has any ideas how I could get my hands on one of those Iskra payphones, drop me an email (address in bio). I have so many ideas for projects involving them, but it seems that I'm a bit too late to stand behind the Telekom dumpster and snag a few before they're scrapped.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Vy any chance, did you write about the project somewhere? I have a similar project on the back burner, but with a rotary-dial handset, and I doubt a pi could provide enough juice to ring.
  - franga2000 4y ago
    I plan to write a blog post about it soon™, but my schedule is absolutely packed this month, so probably not for a while. Here's a placeholder link: https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth I'm using two of those 2€ sound cards from China to drive the handset and ringer speakers and both work quite well. I would probably need to add a small amplifier if I wanted the ringer to be heard from the street through the metal enclosure and plexiglass booth, but that wasn't a requirement for this project.
guerrilla 4y ago
Best article I've seen here in a while. I really miss payphones for some reason. Loved that he's teaching his daughter. > My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Five year old girls calling 911 has saved a lot of lives. I just listened to a whole podcast series about that.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  If I had a landline in my house and went through all the trouble to install an obvious phone like a payphone (well, obvious to older people), I'd definitely want it to be able to call out to 911. When calling from a landline, you're 100% sure that EMS has your correct address (well, assuming that you set up your address correctly when you ordered your ISP service).
hnbad 4y ago
I feel an incredible disconnect with people like this who casually tell public stories about their youthful credit card fraud and other computer crimes (cf. every single story in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution). I understand the anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) and anti-authority attitudes of hacker culture but these stories are not told by anarchist cyberpunks "sticking it to the man" but almost invariably by sheltered (usually WASP) yuppies working for billion dollar companies or in this case, Slack. These aren't so much stories about clever hacks and youthful rebellion but of a youth isolated from consequences for criminal offenses that would otherwise have been sufficient to give them a career-ending criminal record.
charlieyu1 4y ago
They should keep at least a few pay phones. Works great when your phone battery dies. I think I have used one as recent as 2010s.
- crispyambulance 4y ago
  The last time I tried to use a payphone was 2007. I literally could not figure the damn thing out. FWIW, it was immediately after landing in a foreign country and my language/reading skills were not up to par and it was a credit card based thing. After that, I switched to just getting a temporary SIM at the airport.
bambax 4y ago
Excellent story, writing, and end. It's absurd to install a payphone in one's house, and yet after reading this, it feels completely necessary.
karmelapple 4y ago
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?
- aksss 4y ago
  No, God only knows what that service was intended for. :D I do remember our town had a local number, 8463, that we could call to get current time and temperature played back to us.
- willcodeforfoo 4y ago
  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/marks/YDs8iWXB/IMG_6908.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/vDsqiByY/IMG_6904.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/lbs0iE9Z/IMG_6903.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/QZsXiDPR/IMG_6902.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/JJsdiBLo/IMG_6901.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/EbswiReB/IMG_6900.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...
eternityforest 4y ago
It is really cool that there's still some fun to be had with something as simple as POTS, and that this person's experiences, which are a part of hacker history, are preserved and published. Great article!
J8K357R 4y ago
I’m, not sure admitting to fraud, even if the ISP is probably long gone, is a great idea.
lrvick 4y ago
Being able to disconnect when I leave my home office is how I stay happy and productive, and rejecting "app culture" by ditching my smartphone last year has been a big part of that. Still sometimes I need to make an outgoing call to some customer support line or other such nonsense that only works over "the phone". Back in the day before cellphones were an option I would sometimes use a payphone for these edge cases, but they basically no longer exist. I had already canceled my cell phone subscriptions a couple years ago and ported my one remaining cell number to a VoIP provider. This lets me get SMS over email for dumb services I can't avoid like banks that insist on using SMS verification still. Given that setup had worked well, I decided for rare life edge cases that still require classic phone system voice calls I could also get a VoiP ATA box and route calls to it. This let me setup some "dumb" landline phones at home, the first which logically had to be a payphone, which is now installed and working in my home office as of a few months ago, and I love it. It is visible in most of my work video calls and people are often skeptical that it really works. Some call it to test are amazed it works fine. It amuses me.
pisspiss 4y ago
markstos 4y ago
I had that same clear landline phone. Maybe from Radio Shack.
shitshitshit 4y ago
mwexler 4y ago
Nicely written. Humour comes in swift and silently, and makes this a really enjoyable read. I was looking for more info about how to beat the quarter-checker, but even without that, worth the time.
usr1106 4y ago
In the 1990s credit cards were pretty uncommon in Europe. Most shops that a student would shop at did not accept any. When I visited the US I was shocked that you could do all kind of business by just telling or typing in the number on the phone. I soon learned that cheaper businesses (e.g international calls at discount rates) did not accept my foreign card. However, more expensive businesses (like AT&T to stay at the same example) just accepted the number, no questions asked. CVV wasn't in use. A concept that exceeded my imagination, credit card numbers are not that secret, everone working at a checkout could collect them. When reading this I guess they would have also accepted phantasy numbers with a matching checksum. My conclusion back then was: For those operating at comfortable margins some loss by fraud is just priced in. Those offering cheap prices don't have the luxury to do so, so they reject everything that is not easy to verify, like e.g. foreign cards.
deleted 4y ago
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swamp40 4y ago
A pay-for-data would be much more useful in my house. We have a 1TB/month limit that we are constantly going over. And the ATT analytics/tools won't let you pinpoint where it is going.
hk1337 4y ago
> Next, I used a stud finder to detect a stud on the wall Naturally, I imagine he used the stud finder on himself a few times when his wife was in the room.
2b3a51 4y ago
I explained what it was and we took turns listening to the dial tone. I put some quarters in and called my cell phone to show her how it worked. Nostalgia: Early 1960s near Liverpool UK. Being taken up the street to the phone booth to learn how to make a phone call (coins, dial number, press A button, talk, hang up, press B button to claim any leftover coins). Big thing when you are 6 years old.
jaywalk 4y ago
This is really cool, but I was hoping he had gone all the way with the setup and had a simulated CO backend that actually validated that coins were inserted to make a call.
superdug 4y ago
Back in my day this was all called phreaking [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking ] I had the pleasure of knowing a guy who knew a guy when I was in school. Basically there was a prefix 786 that you could (within the area code of course) dial the prefix for the callback 971 and the last 4 digits of the host (thankfully the number of the pay phone is right there on the pay phone) and then hang up twice the phone would ring until you picked the phone up. Fast forward to another thing of the past, the mall! The mall had BANKS of pay-hones just sitting around. So a group of friends and I got to all of the banks and decided to make all the phones ring. We walked around the mall forever as people just looked at the ringing phones and carried on about their lives. After doing it for about an hour security caught on and I got banned from the mall, I think for the fourth or fifth time. It was a beautiful site to see. Two dozen or so payphones just ringing and people completely perplexed as to why.
xeromal 4y ago
Random, but this reminded me of the mid 2000s when you could text google for info. GOOGL was the SMS code I believe. I miss it still. You could send them a query and they would respond with directions, phone numbers, and other kinds of results. You could also call Goog-411 or some variant to get similar info.
- pinko 4y ago
  I just removed GOOG-411 from my address book the other day. RIP.
rconti 4y ago
I'm a Sonic customer and just learned about their Tradewars server! thanks!!
- naet 4y ago
  I am a very happy Sonic customer as well (fuck comcast...) but the tradewars server doesn't seem to still be up? I think early Sonic had a lot of neat stuff like usenet, free hosting, and some other offerings that they have done away with over the years.
Fatnino 4y ago
Why is there a reverse the digits step in the cc# algorithm? Seems like it will work just fine without doing that.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  My understanding is when doing it by hand some like to reverse it so when writing the products the digits get written continuously left to right. I.e. matter of preference.
indus 4y ago
You are on my leaderboard for the best writing for this year. Thank you for rekindling some memories.
alanh 4y ago
> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Well… hmm. I taught my daughter how and when to do that by that age. You never know. That could end up saving a life. She knows not to do it frivolously. This does not seem too advanced a concept for a kindergartner. That said, intercom-like internal system Bertrand built seems to be much cooler than having the real phone.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  > My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Yes, that was really weird to have as the very first item. As a parent I taught my child, when she was young, to know my phone number, to dial 911, and to recognize a police officer and other service people.
pavel_lishin 4y ago
> This basically creates a closed network between two phones. You can configure it so that if you pick up one phone, the other phone rings, and when that phone picks up, you can talk, and vice-versa. So I bought one, drilled a hole to my daughter’s room, and ran another RJ-11 cable to her phone. Okay, well, now I have something to do with the rotary phone I inherited from a previous job. Time to set up a phone line to my kid's room! I wonder if something exists to connect any arbitrary number of phones together. Maybe even with distinct phone numbers? edit: duh, of course it does, PBX. maybe that'll be my summer project.
Maursault 4y ago
My freshman year of HS, I bought a DTMF dialer from Radio Shack. This was a small handheld device with a shallow coupler on the back, and buttons matching those on a DTMF telephone, and pressing them produced the same tones as a telephone. The dialer had a memory function. One day I noticed the tones produced by putting a quarter in a pay phone to tell the backend switch a quarter had been inserted. It was, like, beep beep beep beep beep, really fast. Dimes and nickels made the same tones, but they were shorter, less beeps. Something sounded familiar about these tones, and through trial and error, I realized these tones were made from the DTMF tones of either the asterisk key or the octothorpe key (I can't now remember which, and btw, it is not a hash symbol, it is an octothorpe). By putting enough presses of the right key into the memory of the Radio Shack dialer, I could fool payphones into thinking I had deposited quarters. I had turned my off the shelf Radio Shack DTMF dialer into a Red Box, without actually doing anything to the hardware or electronics. And it was a lot more svelte than the original Woz Red Boxes, about the size of a flip phone when closed. At first, this worked at every payphone, always, any kind of call, local or long distance. I spent a lot of time at the airport and hotel pay phone banks calling a gf long distance. But eventually, my DTMF dialer stopped fooling the switch, so I could no longer make free local calls. But with long distance calls, I'd usually get an operator once the spoofed coin inserts failed, but they would always still fool the operator, who I think assumed line interference prevented (what I assume were) the new digital switches from recognizing coin insert tones. Then that stopped working; somehow the operators knew what I was doing and would accurately describe my spoof to me. So it no longer worked with ordinary common pay phones. But I found a pay phone installation that was not ordinary, I believe it was called a "Smart Payphone," but it was not smart in the way we think of smart phones today; it just had some extra electronics and a small 3 line LCD panel which told you how long your call lasted. I could continue to make local and long distance calls from only these types of pay phones for a few more years until every place I knew there had been one had been uninstalled. It only occurred to me later that I was not stealing from AT&T or some local Bell affiliate. I had been stealing from whomever owned the pay phone, who still had to pay for those long distance calls I made. I have carried the guilt and shame of my juvenile crimes ever since. Not kidding. That was all very, very wrong.
iancmceachern 4y ago
I grew up with a payphone in a entire phone booth (2 actually) in my house. My dad bought old phone booths, old payphones, amd fixed them up. He still has one in his living room.

1129 points by itsjloh 4y ago

Payphone.com is wondering why sales are through the roof!

ck2 4y ago

One last generation might still understand the superman jokes and "I'm going to need an exit" but 100 years from now it's definitely going to need an explainer.

0des 4y ago
The matrix had phone booths in the good one. edit: not one of you asked "which one's the good one".. I rest my case.
- ck2 4y ago
  "Too bad they never made any sequels" https://m.xkcd.com/566/ https://m.xkcd.com/566/
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  I rewatched all 3 recently, and I have to say I don't remember why I and everyone else disliked the sequels so much. They are exciting, and tell a good story. I haven't watched the new one yet.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    Ever watch the newest one they made? It's like baudrillardian banality taken to its logical extreme. The first half is literally a clip show. Comes off as a shitty superhero movie of now but with matrix characters
    - hnbad 4y ago
      The movie is infinitely better if you understand it within its real world context. The Wachowskis did not want to make another Matrix movie but the studio approached them and said that they would make the movie either way but they would be given full artistic freedom if they agreed. They basically had the choice of doing this themselves or letting the studio turn it into a soulless franchise detached from their own vision. The movie is mostly an allegory for how the movie was created and why it shouldn't exist. Aside from mindless indulgence the ending is also giving a middle finger to the production company. The philosophy is dull because everything that needed to be said was already said so the only thing left to do is repeat it more blatantly for the audience in the back. That doesn't mean it's a great movie and you can argue that a movie should be enjoyable without context, but for me knowing this context allowed me to enjoy it through that lens a lot more than I probably would have had I not come into this knowing this.
      - mihaic 4y ago
        My thoughts exactly. As a fan of the first Matrix, it felt a bit cathartic to see the honesty upfront, so I could just see this movie as a standalone statement with some decent visuals. It was pretty much the opposite of watching the latest Star Trek series, that have completely departed from the original philosophy.
      - ck2 4y ago
        They put their name on it. They made appearances. They took a huge paycheck despite already being millionaires and not needing it. So they own it as much as the 1st 2nd or 3rd. They did not have to do that. In fact it would have been an even stronger statement if every review of the 4th started off with "done without the original creators input or approval". But now the 4th has been done with the original creators input and approval, so it's their fault, their mess. In hindsight you can now see the wonder and amazement of the first movies were not just from them but everyone that worked so hard for them, not just the actors but everyone behind the scenes, even the clever color timing, completely absent from the 4th as well as the horrible music, everyone just phoned it in for the paycheck. "Because someone else would do it if we didn't" is not a viable excuse, it would have been a statement otherwise, a path they purposely didn't chose for either ego or profit.
  - ck2 4y ago
    Do not watch the fourth. Not kidding. It's not worth the curiosity. Yes the 2nd and 3rd were great despite critics. The fourth is a "WTF who wrote this garbage money grab" the entire time, it's not even "fan service" because it destroys everything with poor writing and terrible acting, feels like someone was shouting "we'll fix it in post" after every first take rushing to the next shot to churn it out. Remember how epic the music was in the first three? The fourth is like that kid from Bob's Burgers mashing on a keyboard. Remember the epic dialog from Hugo Weaving and those chilling rants from Agent Smith? Yeah absolutely nothing, nothing even vaguely faintly like it in the fourth, it almost undoes the entire franchise.
    - jamal-kumar 4y ago
      I'm really of the opinion that they did that on purpose given the philosophical underpinnings of the original. Like, to make a point, because Warner Bros owned the rights to their franchise and were going to make some banal crap anyways, with or without the Wachowskis.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        That's literally why. Also 2 and 3 were mostly bad because releasing two part movies wasn't a thing at the time and thus the films had to be forced into (unsatisfying) single-movie narrative arcs despite having an obvious overarching narrative. Re-watching 2 and 3 as a double feature years later makes them less of a trainwreck and more of a mildly underwhelming but watchable and solid sequel to a movie so good it was impossible to follow up on. It finishes the story, literally ends the universe it created and ties up the loose ends. On the other hand 4 is the sequel that never should have been but ultimately exists to seal the franchise permanently shut because any attempt to build on it can only be read as a soulless cashgrab because there is now literally nothing left to tell. WB didn't want to let its IP die so the Wachowskis had to drive a stake through its heart and kiss it goodbye.

z82s3 4y ago

I enjoyed learning about BBS door games.

newman314 4y ago

I want to do this but with a real British phone booth.

bpye 4y ago
Well it looks like you can buy them https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403689859315 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403689859315
- wrboyce 4y ago
  It’s worth noting a K6 weighs in at about 1,250kg so “collect in person” is easier said than done! Personally I’d go with a specialist/approved company such as x2connect.
  - bpye 4y ago
    I didn't know x2connect existed, neat.
parenthesis 4y ago
Here in the UK, you see them in people's gardens sometimes: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,276.94h,87.57t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1syREsju2kY4VbYiFvnEcI3w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@55.9164681,-3.1675508,3a,15y,27...

chrissnell 4y ago

I did this back in the early 2000s, when Asterisk first became really popular. My plan was to create an Asterisk PBX in my house and hook the payphone to that and be able to use it to receive and make VoIP calls. Unfortunately, the project never got off the ground because I bought a phone 1) without any keys to the locks and 2) without the proper software and interface cables to be able to program it. I ended up selling it again on eBay for what I paid for it.

hayleox 4y ago

I 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?

adastra22 4y ago
Yeah this also struck me as quite strange. Not that he did it, but that he was so cavalier about it, even after all this time.
bluedino 4y ago
It seems like for a while there we all did shit like that. Or at least said we did.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
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.
- serf 4y ago
  > What you ever see 'hackers'? to be fair that movie follows a group of teenagers showcasing illegal activities that finally culminate into their federal arrest. yeah, they're later exonerated because 'Movie-FBI' has a heart and a sense of justice, but that's probably not the best movie to try to pull criminality psych from. my guess : Eric Corley injected a lot of his own personal ethos into that movie. He was apparently an unpaid consultant.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    It's what people had to model their own behaviour on in a time where most depictions weren't exactly positive I guess? I'm purely speaking retrospectively here

alex_young 4y ago

I don’t know if I enjoyed the idea or the writing more, but I’m very happy I read this. Thank you.

jamal-kumar 4y ago

Back when I was a kid I had alot of fun using methods to get free phone calls on these things. Like, beyond just red-boxing or whatever (Past that time). In Japan, they would just accept DTMF tones from anything that would generate them. There was all these people using hacked cards that they installed countermeasures against which were hilarious because people using these hacked yakuza cards would keep one foot in the doorway in case the fabled alarm would go off, i knew a guy who did this thinking naaah it would never happen to me. NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe... Literally just playing the DTMF tones into the handset would have gotten past that on every 'grey phone' out there (The ones that advertise ISDN connectivity). Wouldn't be surprised if that still works if they still have those phones anywhere. The other way I did it in another country was a telephone company test line (toll free!) which would give you 30 seconds of silence then a dial tone (presumably 'remote'). From this dial tone you could call anywhere in the world. We got some list that phonelosers used to make and called places like the president of Kenya. This guy mentions using a payphone which accepts incoming calls to get the internet as a kid in the 90s. Those which still rang on incoming were mostly gone by my time but a few were still configured to act like that. Was fun to sit down the road with a cellphone and watch people be scared to pick up the line after watching it ring for a few seconds.

meep0l 4y ago
Could you elaborate on the "fabled alarm?"
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  Yeah a red light would flash over the booth and the door would shut closed, hence having to put your foot in there. Alot of people buying and using these cards were like 'bullshit!' but this guy who told me about this figured to err on the side of caution anyways and ended up having to comically escape the situation with all these people looking at him. This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty hilarious nonetheless
  - 4y ago

bluedino 4y ago

Looking at that pay phone makes me think of those ancient phones your had to hand crank. Looking real old now.

daniel_iversen 4y ago

This is very cool, but I'm personally more interested in what he is using for the big digital picture frame next to his phone :)

bredren 4y ago

This was a great post with a very sweet ending. The unexpected screenshot of the LORD intro ascii art was a blast from the past.

burnt_toast 4y ago

The ending was very wholesome

Mobil1 4y ago

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.

jjeaff 4y ago
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?
- nahmean 4y ago
  At one point it was. You could even record the sound on a handheld recorder and play it back. But it hasn’t worked in a long while. Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset. Edit: oh yeah, and after that, you’d just call the operator and tell them the keys were sticky and to dial the number for you, then you’d “insert the coins” by playing the tones. Well, or you just third party billed the call to someone you didn’t know. That worked too.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    After this mitigation was put into place enterprising phreaks would take a lighter to the microphone part of the handset, twist it open, cut the yellow wire, and redbox away.
  - kfrzcode 4y ago
    "bobwehadthebabyitsaboy"
    - jjulius 4y ago
      Oh hey, nostalgia.
  - Slartie 4y ago

spicyramen_ 4y ago

Awesome, I used to work with Mitel PBX which have a feature called DISA which allows you to call a number and place calls from there. The number you call will give you dial tone and you could place calls anywhere I looked up the list of customers with Visa find the main number and try the first 20-100 numbers which was normally the range used (sold DIDs by Telco) during my installation I gave myself access to those via 1800 numbers so it was pretty much able to call LD/cell phone which used to be expensive before

cbhl 4y ago

I 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...

CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
It would be cool! You'd need FXS ports, though (those are the ones which provide the line/ring voltage). You'd also need to research how the payphone indicated coin insertion (bell/2bell/bong or something else), and how to tell the payphone to either return the coins or drop them into the box (in some cases it's an MF signal, in others it's polarity reversal of the phone line).
- jcrawfordor 4y ago
  The PacBell branding suggests this unit hasn't been converted, but most popular payphone model have a COCOT conversion kit available. COCOTs or customer-owned-coin-operated-telephones perform the charging internally and don't require exchange support, so they're a lot simpler to get working. The conversion kits are pretty readily available because a good majority of payphones out in the world today, even operated by the incumbent telco, are actually COCOTs since they've become cheaper and easier to manage over time. Plus a lot of payphones aren't managed by the telco anymore but instead by a separate private company like PTS, which runs all COCOTs with an arrangement where they "dial in" to a management system regularly for configuration and reports. General rule of thumb is that any payphone that accepts credit cards is actually a COCOT, any payphone not branded by the ILEC is a COCOT, and a lot of the rest are COCOTs too depending on the telco. "Genuine" exchange-controlled payphones (that signal coin drops back to the exchange) have become rare. I'm pretty surprised he went with the Viking box actually because it costs more than an inexpensive FXS ATA, and a lot more than getting an ATA used. It's simpler to set up, but on the other hand some ATAs have internal logic to connect their two lines that you can enable so they behave as standalone devices. I think this is typical on the older Ciscos.
4y ago

doctor_eval 4y ago

I’m not usually nostalgic, but I love everything about that phone line simulator. The case, the dip switches, the font, the model number DLE-200B. Brings back memories of a time long past.

the_only_law 4y ago
I was really hoping to find an ISDN simulator with U-interfaces but anything I could find on eBay I wasn’t going to pay for since I had no documentation on how to configure/operate them. I’d try to make one myself if I wasn’t so good at killing hardware.
wolrah 4y ago
Basically everything Viking makes has an old school telecom aesthetic.
2rsf 4y ago
Well, it is an old timer. I spent many days with one in the mid 90's and it wasn't new even then

DeathArrow 4y ago

Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog phone to a digital phone line? I would like to make use of an ancient analog phone.

CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
Yup! You want an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). That's a box which takes Ethernet in, and gives you one or more FXS ports. (An FXS and an FXO port are similar, but the FXS port is the one which provides the current that powers the phone, generates the ringing signal, etc.) It's important to note that other than call routing, the ATA has to do almost everything the phone company would do. The ATA provides any Caller ID, for example. It provides call-waiting, or 3-way conferencing. If you want to use a rotary phone, you'll need one that handles pulse dialing. Your ATA will use SIP to connect to a VoIP provider. Some support using multiple SIP accounts (especially if the ATA has multiple FXS ports.
wolrah 4y ago
> Is there an adapter which allows you to connect an analog phone to a digital phone line? A VoIP analog telephone adapter (ATA) would be the most common form of this these days. Most will have two analog lines, though other configurations are available. The Sipura SPA series and it's derivatives (Linksys PAP2(T), Cisco SPA122) are popular, as well as Obihai's lineup. I've used them all extensively and they're solid. You can connect these to a SIP based VoIP provider or they can operate entirely standalone just calling port to port. With a bit of work you can even link up multiple devices on a private network IP to IP.

bmitc 4y ago

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. From game consoles to land lines to various other things, there were pieces of technology that just worked and worked well. Of course, there was technology that didn't work well, but I think part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.

AlbertCory 4y ago
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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The low latency with a completely analog phone call is amazing. We forget it but it was really really low.
  - GuB-42 4y ago
    If I remember correctly, in many cases, latency was lower than in-person talk, because of the speed of sound.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, effectively you're both whispering directly into each other's ear, which, even if possible in-person is a bit uncomfortable.
- Animats 4y ago

cachvico 4y ago

How come the ISP didn't blacklist his address?

CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
I think the ISP didn't ask for an address. Back then I doubt credit card companies were doing address verification, at least for lower-value purchases. (The infrastructure probably didn't exist.)
thematrixturtle 4y ago
This is a different era of ISP. He was not signing up to have fiber installed to his house or whatever (which was not a thing back then), he was signing up to be able to call out to an ISP's server with his modem and get on the Internet from there. So the only thing the ISP knew about him was a username, password and fake billing details, and since the ISP was presumably not a telco, they could also not tell where the call was coming from.

Ayesh 4y ago

Wow this brings back memories. I stayed at a high school hostel, and and remember calling the high school sweethearts after 9pm, when they had super cheap fares. 9 minutes for an equivalent of $0.02. There was only one phone, so the rest of the kids were in a queue waiting to call theirs. You'll get an earful if you were the one to fill the coin storage (the phone company only comes once a month or so to collect the money) or jam a coin.

zamadatix 4y ago

> > Have you ever used a payphone and thought to yourself, “That would be a great novelty idea for the pool room, family room, or office. What a conversation piece”. > Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have. This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your niche target audience.

ValtteriL 4y ago

I want a payphone to my house straight from a casino in Vegas too! Just worrying about the "seen some shit" thing: where I used to grow up, the only payphone was mostly used as a toilet by drunk people.

mrb 4y ago

I love it that he uses the payphone to talk to his daughter's phone in her room... or rather that she uses her phone to call him ;) I also just set up a private phone network in my house, and my daughter can also call my room, from her bedroom. But it spiraled very quickly into something more evolved & more fun. It all started when I discovered after buying our new house that most rooms were pre-wired with RJ11 outlets, with all the lines going to a central closet. So one day I bought a cheap 8-port PBX for $80 (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MIQ12A https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MIQ12A) and bought a classic rotary phone for my daughter's room, and a regular phone for our room. The PBX needed no configuration whatsoever, it comes with the ports assigned extensions 601, 602, etc, so right away my daughter was elated she could call us from her room by just dialing "601" or whatever. It's important to note we do not have a landline; the PBX's outgoing lines were left unconnected, so it was purely a private phone network. The PBX could also be configured so it auto-dials an extension as soon as the phone is picked up. But I wanted my daughter to learn how to use a rotary dial so I didn't use that feature. As a side note, the "phone line simulator" that the OP uses is basically a minimalist 2-port PBX with no outgoing line. But I thought, how hard is it to replace the PBX with an Asterisk VOIP system? So I replaced the PBX with a $140 Analog Telphone Adapter (also 8 ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TL7N6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TL7N6), I configured the ATA to route calls via SIP to my Linux gateway, on which I installed Asterisk. I wrote a simple Asterisk config defining even shorter extensions so my daughter only has to dial "1" or "2" instead of "601" or "602". Then I set up some extensions that play recorded audio files, like songs, or sweet messages we recorded to each other. Then, later I thought it might be practical for my daughter to be able to call my cellphone (in case of emergencies or whatnot). So I searched for VOIP providers, found https://voip.ms/ https://voip.ms/ and signed up for an account. I configured Asterisk to place outgoing calls through this provider. And I defined new extensions: 3 rings my cellphone, and 4 rings my wife's cellphone, while the other extensions work just as before (eg. 1 still rings our bedroom.) But I specifically did NOT configure Asterisk to be able to place outgoing calls to arbitrary numbers. So the internal phones are only able to call my predefined extensions. And again later I thought it might be practical to be able to call her bedroom phone from my cellphone. So I added a DID number (direct inward dialing) to my voip.ms account. Then I configured Asterisk to accept incoming calls from voip.ms, then prompt for an extension, and forward the call accordingly. So when I call the number, I hear "please dial an extension", then I can type 2, and my daughter's phone rings. In order to avoid spam calls, I made Asterisk check the caller ID and accept calls coming ONLY from my cellphone or from my wife's cellphone. (I'm well aware that caller ID can be spoofed, in fact I have spoofed it myself a few times with my setup as a demonstration to family & friends.) In the 2 months since I bought the DID number I did not see a single call intercepted by my caller id filter. So it looks like I got a pretty "clean" number. I understand that I might not have been that lucky. And that's basically where I'm at today. We have a mostly private in-home phone network, that can also call our cellphones, and our cellphones only are allowed to call into the house phone system. Our daughter will call us in the morning when she wakes up to say what she wants for breakfast. When her cousins visit, they chat on the phone from room to room. It's fun! As someone who knew nothing about Asterisk, I found the official documentation utterly mediocre. The process of configuring it consisted mostly of finding real-world examples, then trying to reverse engineer them by finding what they do from the documentation. But in the end I still got everything to work exactly the way I wanted it.

bschne 4y ago

My grandfather once built a phone line simulator you could connect up to 8 or 10 phones to and actually dial them by a one-digit number. I think he got the schematics from some old electronics magazine. Definitely one of the coolest „toys“ I ever got as a kid.

julianbuse 4y ago
that's incredibly cool!
Gordonjcp 4y ago
In the olden days (up to about the mid-1990s!) the island of Canna off the west coast of Scotland that had a ten-subscriber phone exchange where you could dial any number on the island with a single digit. You could only make one call at a time off the island, via a VHF link on around 80MHz to the telephone exchange in Mallaig about 25 miles away.

slk500 4y ago

great, sweet story

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barbs 4y ago

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.

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retrac 4y ago
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.
payphonefiend 4y ago
You can 100% call Australian payphones. Last week I stood next one in the Sydney CBD and called it, it rung - I didn't pick up. Here's a list with physical addresses and phone numbers. Enjoy. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/B15mu7h/Payphones/master/Payphones_allowing_incoming_calls https://raw.githubusercontent.com/B15mu7h/Payphones/master/P...
- barbs 4y ago
  Username checks out! Wow, didn't know about this at all. Will be experimenting with these for sure. Thanks!

riffraff 4y ago

This was a fantastic read and the end just put a smile on my face thanks for sharing.

marzetti 4y ago

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 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...

shaky-carrousel 4y ago
When I was a kid, we had a trick here in Spain to make free calls in public pay phones. When the other person answered, you had to hang up, wait about half a second and then pick up the phone. The head piece was in a lever, so you had to manipulate that lever. The further the call recipient, the longer you had to wait to pick up. For a person 50 kms away you had to wait a bit over a second, if I recall correctly.
myrryr 4y ago
This is because the NZ answer was to use a regular land line, and dial extra numbers on the end, the exchange would work, but their billing system would throw out the call, giving it to you for free.
blangk 4y ago
We used to get the money back with a pretty reliable mechanical method, stuffing a flattened MacDonald's straw into the machine above the spare change slot and jiggling in and out. You needed a coin for the call but could return and re use it each time or even for the same call.
bjelkeman-again 4y ago
In Sweden, at the high school I went to, we had pay phones which would behave as if you had inserted a coin if you zapped it with static electricity. We used this for a while to make prank calls to other countries. Typically to random numbers we just tried, sometimes in the middle of the night in the other country.

sirius93 4y ago

Nice article.

bjarneh 4y ago

Ok, I need one of those. Very funny and well written piece... > I’m not quite ready to reap what I sow.

slazaro 4y ago

I was just analizing the Luhn algorithm and... the step to reverse the digits doesn't seem to do anything, right? None of the other steps depend on it and in the end you just sum all of the digits together... Is it because the amount of initial digits might not have the same parity and therefore you'd sum a different set of digits depending on whether you reverse or not?

account42 4y ago
I think it only matters for which digits you double if there are an even number of digits.

mattlondon 4y ago

I remember doing something similar to get ISP access in the early 90s. Like AOL various ISPs would be bundled into CDs/floppies and offer a free trial. One of them did not validate the card number, so you could just type in 000000000000 or whatever and your free trial was enabled for a month or whatever and then be auto cancelled when they tried to bill for your first month after the trial. In the UK though local calls were not free and charged by the minute. I think that ISP also bundled a <1.0 version of Netscape's Mozilla (0.8?) on their disk which was nice as otherwise I only had mosaic. Good times. Edit: I think the version of netscape/Mozilla was this one - I distinctly remember the "M" logo that would rotate as pages loaded slowly on a 14.4 modem: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/old-software/web-browsers/netscape-navigator/mosaic-netscape-0-9-01.png https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/old-software/web-br.... Curious that it was called "mosaic netscape" - I don't remember that.

brk 4y ago
When the first Palm VII's came out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_VII) I wanted to see how responsive the wireless connectivity was before buying one. The local Staples store had a functional demo unit, but it had no subscription. So I tried signing up with random info, when it got to entering a card number, I entered 4111 1111 1111 1111, which passes the basic validation checks for a visa (and is obviously easy to remember). The device activated immediately and I was able to try some live data transfers. It worked for about 3 days (I went back to check it out of curiosity). Presumably the activation of service happened locally in the device, or with minimal cross-checking with the backend billing service. A few months later I tried it on another unit and the number no longer worked for activation :)

tempestn 4y ago

Fun story, and that list of door games was a blast from the past. I especially recall some fun times playing Planets: TEOS, trying to whittle down the runaway leader while he was away on vacation...

sambalbadjak 4y ago

I enjoyed reading that!

RektBoy 4y ago

What do you do for living now? B & E ?

franga2000 4y ago

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 Discord channel or answer an incoming call when you picked up the phone. Standing next to the phone talking to friends was strangely fun and nostalgic experience, despite the fact I had only used a payphone once in my life. I got a cellphone very quickly (perks of having a tech journalist in the family), so by the time I was old enough to be able to buy a phone card with my own money I no longer needed it. During the pandemic, all of the remaining phonebooths in the country were quietly shut down and dismantled. I know it's completely irrational, but I'm still sad that I had to eventually return the one I worked on and that in the many years the system was still operational it never occurred to me to buy a card and call someone from a phone booth just for the fun of it. P.S.: If anyone from Slovenia or other ex-Yu countries has any ideas how I could get my hands on one of those Iskra payphones, drop me an email (address in bio). I have so many ideas for projects involving them, but it seems that I'm a bit too late to stand behind the Telekom dumpster and snag a few before they're scrapped.

sangnoir 4y ago
Vy any chance, did you write about the project somewhere? I have a similar project on the back burner, but with a rotary-dial handset, and I doubt a pi could provide enough juice to ring.
- franga2000 4y ago
  I plan to write a blog post about it soon™, but my schedule is absolutely packed this month, so probably not for a while. Here's a placeholder link: https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth I'm using two of those 2€ sound cards from China to drive the handset and ringer speakers and both work quite well. I would probably need to add a small amplifier if I wanted the ringer to be heard from the street through the metal enclosure and plexiglass booth, but that wasn't a requirement for this project.

guerrilla 4y ago

Best article I've seen here in a while. I really miss payphones for some reason. Loved that he's teaching his daughter. > My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Five year old girls calling 911 has saved a lot of lives. I just listened to a whole podcast series about that.

Johnny555 4y ago
If I had a landline in my house and went through all the trouble to install an obvious phone like a payphone (well, obvious to older people), I'd definitely want it to be able to call out to 911. When calling from a landline, you're 100% sure that EMS has your correct address (well, assuming that you set up your address correctly when you ordered your ISP service).

hnbad 4y ago

I feel an incredible disconnect with people like this who casually tell public stories about their youthful credit card fraud and other computer crimes (cf. every single story in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution). I understand the anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) and anti-authority attitudes of hacker culture but these stories are not told by anarchist cyberpunks "sticking it to the man" but almost invariably by sheltered (usually WASP) yuppies working for billion dollar companies or in this case, Slack. These aren't so much stories about clever hacks and youthful rebellion but of a youth isolated from consequences for criminal offenses that would otherwise have been sufficient to give them a career-ending criminal record.

charlieyu1 4y ago

They should keep at least a few pay phones. Works great when your phone battery dies. I think I have used one as recent as 2010s.

crispyambulance 4y ago
The last time I tried to use a payphone was 2007. I literally could not figure the damn thing out. FWIW, it was immediately after landing in a foreign country and my language/reading skills were not up to par and it was a credit card based thing. After that, I switched to just getting a temporary SIM at the airport.

bambax 4y ago

Excellent story, writing, and end. It's absurd to install a payphone in one's house, and yet after reading this, it feels completely necessary.

karmelapple 4y ago

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?

aksss 4y ago
No, God only knows what that service was intended for. :D I do remember our town had a local number, 8463, that we could call to get current time and temperature played back to us.
willcodeforfoo 4y ago
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/marks/YDs8iWXB/IMG_6908.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/vDsqiByY/IMG_6904.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/lbs0iE9Z/IMG_6903.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/QZsXiDPR/IMG_6902.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/JJsdiBLo/IMG_6901.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar... https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/marks/EbswiReB/IMG_6900.jpeg https://cdn.remarkedusercontent.com/file/remarked-prod/1/mar...

eternityforest 4y ago

It is really cool that there's still some fun to be had with something as simple as POTS, and that this person's experiences, which are a part of hacker history, are preserved and published. Great article!

J8K357R 4y ago

I’m, not sure admitting to fraud, even if the ISP is probably long gone, is a great idea.

lrvick 4y ago

Being able to disconnect when I leave my home office is how I stay happy and productive, and rejecting "app culture" by ditching my smartphone last year has been a big part of that. Still sometimes I need to make an outgoing call to some customer support line or other such nonsense that only works over "the phone". Back in the day before cellphones were an option I would sometimes use a payphone for these edge cases, but they basically no longer exist. I had already canceled my cell phone subscriptions a couple years ago and ported my one remaining cell number to a VoIP provider. This lets me get SMS over email for dumb services I can't avoid like banks that insist on using SMS verification still. Given that setup had worked well, I decided for rare life edge cases that still require classic phone system voice calls I could also get a VoiP ATA box and route calls to it. This let me setup some "dumb" landline phones at home, the first which logically had to be a payphone, which is now installed and working in my home office as of a few months ago, and I love it. It is visible in most of my work video calls and people are often skeptical that it really works. Some call it to test are amazed it works fine. It amuses me.

pisspiss 4y ago

markstos 4y ago

I had that same clear landline phone. Maybe from Radio Shack.

shitshitshit 4y ago

mwexler 4y ago

Nicely written. Humour comes in swift and silently, and makes this a really enjoyable read. I was looking for more info about how to beat the quarter-checker, but even without that, worth the time.

usr1106 4y ago

In the 1990s credit cards were pretty uncommon in Europe. Most shops that a student would shop at did not accept any. When I visited the US I was shocked that you could do all kind of business by just telling or typing in the number on the phone. I soon learned that cheaper businesses (e.g international calls at discount rates) did not accept my foreign card. However, more expensive businesses (like AT&T to stay at the same example) just accepted the number, no questions asked. CVV wasn't in use. A concept that exceeded my imagination, credit card numbers are not that secret, everone working at a checkout could collect them. When reading this I guess they would have also accepted phantasy numbers with a matching checksum. My conclusion back then was: For those operating at comfortable margins some loss by fraud is just priced in. Those offering cheap prices don't have the luxury to do so, so they reject everything that is not easy to verify, like e.g. foreign cards.

deleted 4y ago

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swamp40 4y ago

A pay-for-data would be much more useful in my house. We have a 1TB/month limit that we are constantly going over. And the ATT analytics/tools won't let you pinpoint where it is going.

hk1337 4y ago

> Next, I used a stud finder to detect a stud on the wall Naturally, I imagine he used the stud finder on himself a few times when his wife was in the room.

2b3a51 4y ago

I explained what it was and we took turns listening to the dial tone. I put some quarters in and called my cell phone to show her how it worked. Nostalgia: Early 1960s near Liverpool UK. Being taken up the street to the phone booth to learn how to make a phone call (coins, dial number, press A button, talk, hang up, press B button to claim any leftover coins). Big thing when you are 6 years old.

jaywalk 4y ago

This is really cool, but I was hoping he had gone all the way with the setup and had a simulated CO backend that actually validated that coins were inserted to make a call.

superdug 4y ago

Back in my day this was all called phreaking [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking ] I had the pleasure of knowing a guy who knew a guy when I was in school. Basically there was a prefix 786 that you could (within the area code of course) dial the prefix for the callback 971 and the last 4 digits of the host (thankfully the number of the pay phone is right there on the pay phone) and then hang up twice the phone would ring until you picked the phone up. Fast forward to another thing of the past, the mall! The mall had BANKS of pay-hones just sitting around. So a group of friends and I got to all of the banks and decided to make all the phones ring. We walked around the mall forever as people just looked at the ringing phones and carried on about their lives. After doing it for about an hour security caught on and I got banned from the mall, I think for the fourth or fifth time. It was a beautiful site to see. Two dozen or so payphones just ringing and people completely perplexed as to why.

xeromal 4y ago

Random, but this reminded me of the mid 2000s when you could text google for info. GOOGL was the SMS code I believe. I miss it still. You could send them a query and they would respond with directions, phone numbers, and other kinds of results. You could also call Goog-411 or some variant to get similar info.

pinko 4y ago
I just removed GOOG-411 from my address book the other day. RIP.

rconti 4y ago

I'm a Sonic customer and just learned about their Tradewars server! thanks!!

naet 4y ago
I am a very happy Sonic customer as well (fuck comcast...) but the tradewars server doesn't seem to still be up? I think early Sonic had a lot of neat stuff like usenet, free hosting, and some other offerings that they have done away with over the years.

Fatnino 4y ago

Why is there a reverse the digits step in the cc# algorithm? Seems like it will work just fine without doing that.

zamadatix 4y ago
My understanding is when doing it by hand some like to reverse it so when writing the products the digits get written continuously left to right. I.e. matter of preference.

indus 4y ago

You are on my leaderboard for the best writing for this year. Thank you for rekindling some memories.

alanh 4y ago

> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Well… hmm. I taught my daughter how and when to do that by that age. You never know. That could end up saving a life. She knows not to do it frivolously. This does not seem too advanced a concept for a kindergartner. That said, intercom-like internal system Bertrand built seems to be much cooler than having the real phone.

IncRnd 4y ago
> My daughter is 5 - I don’t want her dialing 911. Yes, that was really weird to have as the very first item. As a parent I taught my child, when she was young, to know my phone number, to dial 911, and to recognize a police officer and other service people.

pavel_lishin 4y ago

> This basically creates a closed network between two phones. You can configure it so that if you pick up one phone, the other phone rings, and when that phone picks up, you can talk, and vice-versa. So I bought one, drilled a hole to my daughter’s room, and ran another RJ-11 cable to her phone. Okay, well, now I have something to do with the rotary phone I inherited from a previous job. Time to set up a phone line to my kid's room! I wonder if something exists to connect any arbitrary number of phones together. Maybe even with distinct phone numbers? edit: duh, of course it does, PBX. maybe that'll be my summer project.

Maursault 4y ago

My freshman year of HS, I bought a DTMF dialer from Radio Shack. This was a small handheld device with a shallow coupler on the back, and buttons matching those on a DTMF telephone, and pressing them produced the same tones as a telephone. The dialer had a memory function. One day I noticed the tones produced by putting a quarter in a pay phone to tell the backend switch a quarter had been inserted. It was, like, beep beep beep beep beep, really fast. Dimes and nickels made the same tones, but they were shorter, less beeps. Something sounded familiar about these tones, and through trial and error, I realized these tones were made from the DTMF tones of either the asterisk key or the octothorpe key (I can't now remember which, and btw, it is not a hash symbol, it is an octothorpe). By putting enough presses of the right key into the memory of the Radio Shack dialer, I could fool payphones into thinking I had deposited quarters. I had turned my off the shelf Radio Shack DTMF dialer into a Red Box, without actually doing anything to the hardware or electronics. And it was a lot more svelte than the original Woz Red Boxes, about the size of a flip phone when closed. At first, this worked at every payphone, always, any kind of call, local or long distance. I spent a lot of time at the airport and hotel pay phone banks calling a gf long distance. But eventually, my DTMF dialer stopped fooling the switch, so I could no longer make free local calls. But with long distance calls, I'd usually get an operator once the spoofed coin inserts failed, but they would always still fool the operator, who I think assumed line interference prevented (what I assume were) the new digital switches from recognizing coin insert tones. Then that stopped working; somehow the operators knew what I was doing and would accurately describe my spoof to me. So it no longer worked with ordinary common pay phones. But I found a pay phone installation that was not ordinary, I believe it was called a "Smart Payphone," but it was not smart in the way we think of smart phones today; it just had some extra electronics and a small 3 line LCD panel which told you how long your call lasted. I could continue to make local and long distance calls from only these types of pay phones for a few more years until every place I knew there had been one had been uninstalled. It only occurred to me later that I was not stealing from AT&T or some local Bell affiliate. I had been stealing from whomever owned the pay phone, who still had to pay for those long distance calls I made. I have carried the guilt and shame of my juvenile crimes ever since. Not kidding. That was all very, very wrong.

iancmceachern 4y ago

I grew up with a payphone in a entire phone booth (2 actually) in my house. My dad bought old phone booths, old payphones, amd fixed them up. He still has one in his living room.