In the past few months, along with my growing interest in the pre-world-wide-web internet and, before that, bulletin board systems I’ve also have a very related interest in the telephone system of yesteryear. At the time, it was in some ways the largest machine ever made by humanity and when you really get into just how calls actually made their way from your phone to elsewhere on the world from between the early 20th century all the way to the 90’s, it’s just incredible.
I won’t spend this entry getting into the details – there is way too much to go over in any single article. Whole books have been written on the subject, and one person who was in the scene in the 70’s and 80’s recorded literally hours of just calls being made in the old system.
Phreaks, a slang contraction of “Phone Freaks,” are a type of person who takes heavy interest in the telecommunications, primarily in an historic sense the phone network. They are the originators of the “hacking” scene in many ways and even today, while the phone network itself may be absolutely sterile and boring, there are re-creations of old aspects of it and even entire legacy switching systems still running that you can actually call and mess around with!
The thing some people don’t get about the nature of Phreaks is that it isn’t about actually reaching someone: it’s all about the way that the call gets routed. It’s all in the sounds, primarily, of the various systems that had been devised and wired together over the decades which made the old system magic to many. A call from your home might go through a completely different set of equipment from that of your friends house, for example, and thus sound totally different not just in connecting but in the actual end quality of the conversation.
Phreaks, due to both acquiring documentation related to “Ma Bell” and the equipment used, combined with some good old ingenuity and happenstance, didn’t just figure out how it worked, but how to manipulate the system to their own ends for both dubiously legal and certainly, at times, illegal, or at the very least nefarious intents.
I’m not into the doing anything in the latter category; after all, the phone network isn’t the same at all anymore and manipulating it the way they did in the past just isn’t happening. Yeah, there are other ways to “hack” it but that’s using the same modern techniques that everything else is attacked by, so it’s honestly “boring” to me by comparison, and too risky to do anyway — I don’t want to get in actual legal trouble, after all.
Again, though – most of what the phreaks did wasn’t illegal itself, not till AT&T and the related phone companies got tired of people messing around with their systems. Of course as technology changed people found new exploits, as always happens. It’s a pretty interesting thing to study, at least to me.
Then comes the topic of the actual devices. Phone themselves. Not smartphones that everyone obsesses over today, no no, I’m talking about a good old Western Electric model 500 rotary dial set made in 1966 (read, the one in the photo) and other phones like that. Real landline phones. Good stuff.
Of course, the classic landline is all bud dead today – at best you get a VOIP system with your ISP. Well, those are expensive so to indulge in my new hobby I snagged a Magic Jack. This is a current model which can be plugged into the router, thus meaning I don’t have to have a computer on to use it… which also means it functions pretty much like a normal phone connection, except it’s Voice over IP, of course. Still, it’s good enough for calling random numbers using an actual vintage phone, some BBS and dial up networking stuff, and whatever else I may want to use such for. Combined with a specialty device I found on eBay I have a bit of a routable phone network here at home, which is literally just for me to play around with.
Yeah, there is a lot to say here. I’ll probably quit now, but I’ll leave with a few videos of note, for what they are worth.
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