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was technology that didn't work well, but I think part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.
I think the technology itself is 100x better in just about every way(Except for pure novelty, smartphones largely killed true gadgets)
The lack of fun, to me, is mostly because of how everything changed around it.
I can make a basic website now, no problem, everything is easier than it was aside from the fact we pretty much have to have HTTPS.
But, nobody will read it, because it will be lost in a sea of clickbait. I will have a hard time writing it, because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait, and worst of all, I'll have a hard time finding things to write about.
And of course, the very fact it all does work so incredibly well, with a Sci-fi level of polish, means... it's no longer new. Most of it is being a cruise ship tourist, not an Arctic explorer.
Because the internet is dead without the offline stuff that gives it meaning.
It's like, binoculars and a field notes book with nobody to spy on, the perfect party where nobody shows up, or a spreadsheet showing all the customers someone doesn't have.
I think it's just like the idea of set and setting.
The internet/tech/coding/etc is the drug, and we lost all the cultural context, so now it's less "A beer at the bonfire with friends" and more "I had a bottle of wine alone because I don't know what else to do with myself".
For those of us who still embrace RSS and try to avoid the clickbait and social media, please create a basic website. The more of those basic sites we have, the more people will avoid social media to some extent.
My GFs blog is like in its 6th year now and every year its more visitors. Its not that much in internet terms (we are at ~700 visitors a day) but its serious content (dogs and science around dogs). No clickbaits, no cookies, no nothing.
> That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud.
That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.
In the grand scheme of things, what he did is hardly the end of the world.
And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it.
And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.
I think if he would describe it as a youthful indiscretion or something similar it would go a long way.
I am not sure credit card fraud is innocent pranks or misbehavior... I can tell you with certainty that most teenagers have never committed that sort of crimes tbh.
Going through the grueling immigration process, Homeland Security eventually sits across the table from you, looks you in the eye, and asks "have you ever committed a crime for which you have not been convicted?"
> 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.
That's right -- modern age stuff isn't as _hackable_. Especially not at the hardware level. You get an Alexa or a mobile phone or a camera, it's all just a chip on a PCB in a plastic case, not intended to be fiddled with by anybody (not the owner, not some repair show, literally _nobody_) just to be thrown away after a year or two and replaced by a new one.
It's all very sad. There is still some software component to things that's hackable, but even that's harder to do. In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world. Unless daddy/mommy gave them a Linux box, then the story is different.
> In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world.
In the past you couldn't upgrade the memory in your C64, now you can open the case on any desktop and put in different RAM. Laptops are sometimes upgradable as well. The raspberry pi even comes as a bare board for hacking on.
The kinds of hacking you can do today are different, but things are just as hackable if you want. If you don't want to hack, just get things done, then today things are much better, computers mostly just work for people who need to get things done.
I believe the reason technology could spark so much joy for a young mind back a few dozen years back is more that it was much simpler rather than "it just worked".
It was simple and therefore easier to tamper and play with. Also, because it was so simple, more knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanisms was required to use the technology. In the early years of the internet, simply operating a computer and exploring the web was an adventure in itself!
Now, things have gotten plenty complicated and that complexity brings bugs and makes the technology impenetrable to the common folk even with an educated mind - you need to be an expert now. If it's too complex, you can't play with it, and if you can't play with it, you don't learn and you don't have fun.
I feel that your conclusion, 'it just worked', is more a consequence of the increase in complexity rather than a root cause in itself.
Very true. The old-fashioned telephone handset was a masterpiece of human engineering. I bet with state-of-the-art mic and speakers, it would still be way better than a smartphone for actual phone calls.
Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.
With the 1950s mic and speakers, it was substantially better than a smartphone.
The Western Electric model 1500 [1], from 1963, is generally considered the best analog phone [1]. This was rented, not sold, so it is extremely reliable and rugged.
Best audio quality was with ISDN phones. Digital end to end, synchronized at the bit level, no noise, no dropouts.
The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior in sound quality to anything you'd find in a cheap phone these days. I hooked one up to Discord last month for an art instalation and could not believe my ears when it sounded way better than the 3 other people in the call using flagship smartphones.
I converted an old rotary phone into a mobile phone (https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/), and the quality is much better than a mobile. Even just the sidetone makes it SO much better to talk on.
I have no idea why modern mobile phones have no (or very low volume?) sidetone. It makes the UX orders of magnitude better.
I have a lot of the same nostalgia, but so much of this story is that necessity is the mother of invention.
The author:
1. Had more time than he knew what to do with.
2. Didn't have money
3. Had authority figures getting in the way of what he wanted to do.
A decade later, kids were 'hacking' their parents' wifi access points by logging in as admin/password to bypass "go to bed and stop using the internet" restrictions, but the author was not, because he likely had more money, less time, and most importantly, no authority to bypass :)
> part of the tragedy is that a lot of technology that worked well has been replaced by "better" technology that doesn't work well.
I am 100% convinced that '80's era landlines had superior sound quality to today's cellphones by any manufacturer. I went out of my way to get a Samsung Note that ostensibly supports some high-quality sound when communicating with another device that supports whatever this profile is called, but all conversations are streams of "what? say again?".
Yes I know that POTS landlines generally discard much not-in-human-vocal-range sounds that still affect how we perceive voice. But even with that limitation, I feel that the difference in sound quality as I remember it and as I now experience it cannot all be attributed to 30 years of rock concerts and rifle fire on these eardrums.
That's a very crude way of saying it and I 100% agree. The digital revolution promised to make analog world more precise, but we ended up having so much complexity as a result and the benefits gained by precision at low level is replaced by ever increasing chaos at high level. We seem to think having many things rendered simultaneously and faster are inherently so good not just for things like games that we built frameworks like React that run big parts of the web.
It's as if we decided increasing entropy isn't so bad after all.
Survivorship bias I think is at play here (especially with our own memories being infallible). I also remember a TON of shit being a pain in the ass and not working well at all.
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.
I worked at a telco a little over ten years ago when they took out all the pay phones in our city. In the garage there were these enormous bins full of them, staged for some unknown fate. A couple colleagues and I had gone down to take a look at the spectacle and inquired if we could take one, and they were like, “sure!”. We climbed in an grabbed ourselves some payphones. Still have one in my garage - I think it’s cool as shit.
Not sure where GP was, but in NZ which I think was fairly typical, pay phone cards were introduced in 1989 - you could buy them at nearly any corner shop. I think the big advantages were coin collectors no longer being necessary (they were a huge overhead!), and vandalism to steal the coins being no more.
At least over here in the EU coins were later substituted by magnetic phone cards; iirc in the late 80s, presumably as a measure against vandalism and theft.
When phone booths were later decommissioned, all those cards became collectibles and still have a market online.
In Austria at least, this was quite common. I remember that the phone booth in our school only accepted a phone card and almost every pupil had one for emergency cases. You could buy them easily in magazine shops.
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.
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
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.
In North America, ringing takes about 100 volts, but any control will do. Link the control circuit to an ice cube relay, then have that control the higher voltage.
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...
A friend of mine had a system for getting free calls from New Zealand payphones.
He installed a small switch between the payphone and the line before it went into the ground. He then exploited the lack of coordination between the phone and the exchange.
* First he would pick up the phone and start dialing 0800 (equivalent of 1-800), the phone would see this was a free number and ignore what was being entered next.
* Then he would briefly interrupt the line. The phone wouldn't notice but the exchange would think the call had ended.
* Then he would dial a new number. The exchange would think the payphone was making sure he paid, while the payphone would think he was still dialing a free number.
So to call 0900 123 456 for free he would dial 0800-click-0900123456
Obviously the phone company audits quickly turned up a problem but he got away with it for a little while.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
This did not happen.
Almost no Japanese public telephones even in 2022 have a) doors which lock or b) motors/servos to operate the door. The exception on motors is a specialty item "automatic door (electric type)" which is sold primarily as an accessibility aid for people who cannot operate unpowered doors. The door, in all cases, is for caller privacy, not for preserving the integrity of telephone billing.
I feel _extremely_ confident in this, and confident that you would get an immediate on-the-record denial from NTT if you asked. One reason among many: if the phone booth was physically capable of locking people inside that would endanger human life in a natural disaster, and the first rule of engineering in Japan is that one's system must function during natural disasters.
On this I will see "I once talked to a Japanese woman" and raise you "I have written the acceptance testing protocols required by that 'rule' for a firm which produced publicly-deployable hardware artifacts." plus "I have two working eyeballs and can confirm the absence of a motor in almost all telephone deployments."
(Apologies for someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet here but we were extremely serious about rule #1.)
> 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.
How did this work? Did it literally lock you inside and how did you exit?
It's something that happened in the late 90s, some time after I was in Japan myself. I trust the source, his Japanese wife corroborated it somewhat embarrassed.
Wow, there's a name I haven't heard or thought about in years... I wonder if RBCP's writings are still floating around somewhere. Even the fictional ones (especially the fictional ones, I guess) are amazing.
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
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.
Was it literally just the sound of money dropping that validated the call? Presumably this was before automatic switching and a live operator had to connect you?
I once made a call from a pay phone and after I was done it rang. I picked up. A very nice lady told me I had not paid enough and whether I could please put in another quarter or whatever. That was an interesting experience.
In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated, especially the count the money part.
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.
It was automated. The coin drop sound (or at least what was generated for the wire by the phone) was what drove the switch. All signals on POTS lines were sounds (thus the tones for pressing buttons or the numbers of clicks from dial phones).
No, there were tones that the phone sent for each coin value. IIRC they were fairly brief and somewhat "blippy", unlike the flat DTMF tones. Back in the day you could build a Red Box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)) that would simulate these tones.
Automatic switching came decades before automated billing. See "Operator Assisted Toll Dialing" (1949).[1] The operators are tone-dialing calls, but the billing system is entirely paper based.
Billing automation came in the 1960s, but didn't involve computers yet. Special purpose hardware, paper tape, and punched cards were involved.
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).
> > 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.
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.
When the first Palm VII's came out (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 :)
Readit News
The lack of fun, to me, is mostly because of how everything changed around it.
I can make a basic website now, no problem, everything is easier than it was aside from the fact we pretty much have to have HTTPS.
But, nobody will read it, because it will be lost in a sea of clickbait. I will have a hard time writing it, because I will be distracted by the sea of clickbait, and worst of all, I'll have a hard time finding things to write about.
And of course, the very fact it all does work so incredibly well, with a Sci-fi level of polish, means... it's no longer new. Most of it is being a cruise ship tourist, not an Arctic explorer.
Because the internet is dead without the offline stuff that gives it meaning.
It's like, binoculars and a field notes book with nobody to spy on, the perfect party where nobody shows up, or a spreadsheet showing all the customers someone doesn't have.
I think it's just like the idea of set and setting.
The internet/tech/coding/etc is the drug, and we lost all the cultural context, so now it's less "A beer at the bonfire with friends" and more "I had a bottle of wine alone because I don't know what else to do with myself".
Welcome to the 21st century! One of the 20th century's main themes was humans having to learn how to live in a world of infinite sugar, fat and salt.
Here in the 21st century, we have to learn how to live in a world of infinite information.
What will you do with your attention today? Will you consume the mental equivalent of broccoli or snickers bars?
My GFs blog is like in its 6th year now and every year its more visitors. Its not that much in internet terms (we are at ~700 visitors a day) but its serious content (dogs and science around dogs). No clickbaits, no cookies, no nothing.
That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.
And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it.
And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.
I think if he would describe it as a youthful indiscretion or something similar it would go a long way.
That's called projection.
That's right -- modern age stuff isn't as _hackable_. Especially not at the hardware level. You get an Alexa or a mobile phone or a camera, it's all just a chip on a PCB in a plastic case, not intended to be fiddled with by anybody (not the owner, not some repair show, literally _nobody_) just to be thrown away after a year or two and replaced by a new one.
It's all very sad. There is still some software component to things that's hackable, but even that's harder to do. In the past you turned on your C64 and could start write away code, average Joe Teenager needs to install some IDE and pull in hundreds of NPM dependencies from shady places just to show a hello world. Unless daddy/mommy gave them a Linux box, then the story is different.
Or he could open a console in his web browser.
The kinds of hacking you can do today are different, but things are just as hackable if you want. If you don't want to hack, just get things done, then today things are much better, computers mostly just work for people who need to get things done.
It was simple and therefore easier to tamper and play with. Also, because it was so simple, more knowledge and understanding of the underlying mechanisms was required to use the technology. In the early years of the internet, simply operating a computer and exploring the web was an adventure in itself!
Now, things have gotten plenty complicated and that complexity brings bugs and makes the technology impenetrable to the common folk even with an educated mind - you need to be an expert now. If it's too complex, you can't play with it, and if you can't play with it, you don't learn and you don't have fun.
I feel that your conclusion, 'it just worked', is more a consequence of the increase in complexity rather than a root cause in itself.
Of course, I have to admit that my Bluetooth headset is pretty good, and a first-class gaming headset would be even better.
The Western Electric model 1500 [1], from 1963, is generally considered the best analog phone [1]. This was rented, not sold, so it is extremely reliable and rugged.
Best audio quality was with ISDN phones. Digital end to end, synchronized at the bit level, no noise, no dropouts.
[1] http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/we/we1500.html
I have no idea why modern mobile phones have no (or very low volume?) sidetone. It makes the UX orders of magnitude better.
The author:
1. Had more time than he knew what to do with.
2. Didn't have money
3. Had authority figures getting in the way of what he wanted to do.
A decade later, kids were 'hacking' their parents' wifi access points by logging in as admin/password to bypass "go to bed and stop using the internet" restrictions, but the author was not, because he likely had more money, less time, and most importantly, no authority to bypass :)
Yes I know that POTS landlines generally discard much not-in-human-vocal-range sounds that still affect how we perceive voice. But even with that limitation, I feel that the difference in sound quality as I remember it and as I now experience it cannot all be attributed to 30 years of rock concerts and rifle fire on these eardrums.
That's a very crude way of saying it and I 100% agree. The digital revolution promised to make analog world more precise, but we ended up having so much complexity as a result and the benefits gained by precision at low level is replaced by ever increasing chaos at high level. We seem to think having many things rendered simultaneously and faster are inherently so good not just for things like games that we built frameworks like React that run big parts of the web.
It's as if we decided increasing entropy isn't so bad after all.
Dead Comment
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.
Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco card.
I presume you could buy the cards back in the day, anywhere and easily?
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.
He installed a small switch between the payphone and the line before it went into the ground. He then exploited the lack of coordination between the phone and the exchange.
* First he would pick up the phone and start dialing 0800 (equivalent of 1-800), the phone would see this was a free number and ignore what was being entered next.
* Then he would briefly interrupt the line. The phone wouldn't notice but the exchange would think the call had ended.
* Then he would dial a new number. The exchange would think the payphone was making sure he paid, while the payphone would think he was still dialing a free number.
So to call 0900 123 456 for free he would dial 0800-click-0900123456
Obviously the phone company audits quickly turned up a problem but he got away with it for a little while.
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.
This did not happen.
Almost no Japanese public telephones even in 2022 have a) doors which lock or b) motors/servos to operate the door. The exception on motors is a specialty item "automatic door (electric type)" which is sold primarily as an accessibility aid for people who cannot operate unpowered doors. The door, in all cases, is for caller privacy, not for preserving the integrity of telephone billing.
I feel _extremely_ confident in this, and confident that you would get an immediate on-the-record denial from NTT if you asked. One reason among many: if the phone booth was physically capable of locking people inside that would endanger human life in a natural disaster, and the first rule of engineering in Japan is that one's system must function during natural disasters.
On this I will see "I once talked to a Japanese woman" and raise you "I have written the acceptance testing protocols required by that 'rule' for a firm which produced publicly-deployable hardware artifacts." plus "I have two working eyeballs and can confirm the absence of a motor in almost all telephone deployments."
(Apologies for someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet here but we were extremely serious about rule #1.)
Why didn't you install DTMF filters on the phones lol I was calling like new zealand and shit.
And I'm talking like, 20 years ago plus here... It could be bullshit for sure, I'm relating someone else's story.
How did this work? Did it literally lock you inside and how did you exit?
It's something that happened in the late 90s, some time after I was in Japan myself. I trust the source, his Japanese wife corroborated it somewhat embarrassed.
Wow, there's a name I haven't heard or thought about in years... I wonder if RBCP's writings are still floating around somewhere. Even the fictional ones (especially the fictional ones, I guess) are amazing.
This was like 5 years before my own time in Japan but pretty hilarious nonetheless
In my mind I thought that pay phones were fully automated, especially the count the money part.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/seinfeld/comments/4chcmp/seinfeld_e...
Billing automation came in the 1960s, but didn't involve computers yet. Special purpose hardware, paper tape, and punched cards were involved.
[1] https://vimeo.com/390769230
> 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.
> Why yes, payphone.com, yes I have.
This had me rolling but it's also a great example of knowing your niche target audience.
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-br....
Curious that it was called "mosaic netscape" - I don't remember that.
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 :)