It may be a good time to cover a section of my life that was ages ago.
I was a minor, and with it being forty years ago, I doubt that their are any statutes of limitations still ticking. Even with that being said, do not think that I am going to reveal my phreak name. nuh uh, no way.
Do you know what a phreak is/was? The phone systems have changed drastically so what I was doing then is likely not used much at all anymore if at all.
The context with my kind of phreak, is a phone phreak. We did pretty much everything that one could do with a phone.
We abused the lines in all kinds of ways. Some of my favorite forms dealt with long distance services. I was interviewed by the security groups of all the major players at the time. And not for a job.
Before ESS-5 came along giving us cool features like caller ID, we could do so much more with less fear of being caught. We of course, felt that had we been caught there were two likelihoods, prosecution (for the non-minors) or getting hired. Yes, we would not have minded going from black hat phreaks to white hat phreaks.
I was known for building teleconferences. Let me side step for a moment. Are you aware of loop lines? A loop line is a pair of numbers xxx-9948 and xxx-9949 for example. One was silent until someone called the other number thus making the connection. The other number had an oscillating tone that was really annoying to listen to. The nice thing about loop lines, if you felt that they were recording the numbers that you were dialing, you could use the loop since neither party called each other… you never really talked right?
When creating conference calls, you needed to do it as if you were the operator. They have a different set of touch tones. Consumer phones use dual tone multi frequency touch tones (DTMF). But operator consoles were MF, their tones were different. So, we needed to bump the operator off the line to have our fun.
2600hz, I am sure that you tube has a video demonstrating it. You may have heard of the now infamous Captain Crunch whistle. It was a toy you could pull from a box of Captain Crunch cereal, back when they let us kids have fun and cheap toys in the box. When you blew that whistle while on the phone with say directory assistance who was on an old phone system (I liked using Texas DA) it would knock the operator off the line. We found a Hallmark card that played Let Me Call You Sweetheart with e 2600 in the song. That was nice because the operator at least got a nice song before she was so rudely dropped form the call. Back then, I could whistle that tone manually. However, it was just easier if I did it with my TRS-80 Color Computer. After all I needed it to generate the MF tone for the next step in the process.
Calling the teleconferencing center. While acting as an operator, I would dial the teleconferencing center and order a conference for “my customer”. Depending on which number I dialed, would determine which center I used. My favorite for no particular reason was Alliance Teleconferencing in White Plains New York. Once connected, the system would ask for how many lines were needed. Well… 30 sounded good.
Boom- I had a conference call. What did you do next? Well you called the loop lines around the country were the other phone phreaks were waiting for the next conference to yak the day/night away. Oh we talked about everything. Heck, I think I had phone sex, before actual sex. (Fond memories)
When the conference call would crash, one of us would start the process all over again.
Did you know that (it may not be this way anyone with the state of the art systems) the records you would hear say when the number being called is disconnected was actually a phone number with a recorded response? We would scan the local phone numbers looking for fun recordings to forward our phones to while we were sleeping or at school. Imagine, you are calling your friend form your home home and the system asks you to deposit 25 cents…. into WHERE?
Here are some other samples:
“Your three minutes are up.”
“Please ask your mother to help you.”
“Check the address and write them a letter.”
“No charge due to court decision.”
One night while I was dialing into a San Francisco line, I found Steve Wozniak being interviewed by some publication. It was a fascinating discussion. He went into his use of the Blue Box (we had so many colorful boxes) tones which were the operator tones. This was just before the Apple IIc was released in 1984.
I think I will continue this series of tales later. I have dragged you far enoguh for tonight.