Vintage PopSci: 7 Phone Ideas That Are More Innovative Than The iPhone 5

I remember the good old days, when I could record the dialing sounds from a rotary phone on my portable cassette player and play them over the receiver of a pay phone and make free calls. Ah,.... the early days of hacking. Ooops, perhaps I have said too much.

@Robot LOL.

The only "sounds" a rotary phone made was "click, click", as the switch breaks/makes the connection, you are thinking of touch tone phones, which have always been push buttons, each button putting out two tones for each number. Replaying tones can dial a number.

The rotary phone dialed a number by breaking and connecting, like one break/connect in certain period of time was 1, two break/connect is 2, ...

You could replay the clicks of a rotary phone all you want and it won't call anyone. (I know, I tried it as a kid. ;-) )

Tcolguin,
Hmmmm? Perhaps you’re right. But I do remember somehow tricking those local pay phones to make a call.

It has been a while and back then my cordless phone was a really really long cord.

Also the local phone hub did not have enough lines for all the homes, so we had party lines. You pick up the phone and you hear other people speaking and you have to ask some of them ‘nicely’ to get off the line, so you could make a call.

I also remember making a long distance phone call to a friend and hang up to a certain quantity of rings to alert my friend, if I was coming over or not, thereby not paying for the long distance phone call.

I remember that scene from Hackers as well Robot. Except as tcolguin has already stated, rotary dial phones didn't make tones. You could dial a number by pressing the disconnection pins in proper sequences on the cradle however, but for that much effort, you might as well just use the rotor.

In fact a bit of trivia, Capt' Crunch (the phreaker) got his name by learning to hack telco switches using a whistle he got in a box of Capt' Crunch. And there was a blind guy that had pitch perfect whistling and he was able to access and bypass switches just by whistling the proper pitch and in the proper sequence. Ah, the good old days before digital connections... Hell I remember usernets, back BEFORE the internet. We would dial into a local server, the server would call us back to make the connection and we could type back and forth to folks from other local areas... it was amazing. I do sorta miss looking at a 5 inch amber and black screen chatting away with friends I went to school with like we had never met lol

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

Apple should sue these jerks

I remember a movie where there was no telephone (ripped out), and they dial a number by shorting the wires together, and then click away in Morse code to let the people know where they are. ;-)

Reproducing the touch tones was really pretty hard, you needed a good recorder for it, or a real talent.

Each "tone" isn't really a "tone" it is in fact two tones together. It was done this way because noise on the line might produce a given tone, but picking two tones with different harmonics made it next to impossible for it to be randomly created.

On the rotary phone, I eventually took a phone apart and figured it out (I later became an electronic tech. ;-)

You had to have to old phones so that you could watch the rotary dial switches work, once they change to touch tone phones with a "pulse" switch it was all done with a relay or even internal to the chip, that was harder to figure out.

Recording coin sounds.

What was possible, and was done by a few, to get FREE phone calls, was to record the sounds of coins dropping and play them back when the operator asked for more money. She(or he), would listen for the sound made, by the old style pay phone, for each coin type being entered. A quarter was "ding-ding",a dime was "ding", and a nickel was another chime sound. The old phone that had the three circular slots at the top was the style phone that made these coded coin 'ding' sounds. All that was required was to play a sequence of sounds of coins being entered, [i.e. "ding-ding, ding-ding" was $0.50] and fool the operator in believing you were entering real money.

It's of no value now-a-days because this simple coding method was long ago replaced with sophisticated digital signalling techniques used today.

Hacker of old

TomVil,
Ha ha, interesting and cool info, thanks! I guess the reason the movies repeated this, because it was going on in real life. The movies just didn't actually show how it was really being done. Woe-a, imagine if the whole country was suddenly informed how to cheat Ma-Bell!

I remember a time when a buddies dad worked for Ma-Bell and we got a list of numbers (access codes) that would connect us to satellites over a pay phone and then we could call anywhere in the world. We didn't dare use our home phones so we couldn't be traced and we used pay phones in other neighborhoods just in case. The fun in the 70's...

Just recently watched the old movie "War Games" (I guess only old by my standard...) and even though it was ridiculous how many things just weren't right (the wire hookup when he was hacking the payphone) it was a very good movie.

"God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it."