Back in my youth,we still had party line phones for landlines that had special rings when a connection was sought to a shared phone line to distinguish which call was for each customer on the line. If you wanted to place a call,you would lift the receiver and listen to it to see if another on the party line had a call in process as you could listen to the entire conversation. Often you would ask how much longer the phone was needed for the present call to determine how long it would be to make your call. Private lines were not available in our area yet and hanging out on the phone was not tolerated. Imagine being a love-struck teenager and not getting to listen to your true love's breathing as they listened to yours...tragedy!
We had pay phones that cost a massive ten cents for the first minute and rolled up more dollar figures as each minute rolled by. There were interuptions warning you when the rate was about to increase and if you did not feed the phone more coins,the call was disconnected. Long distance calling was something that requires an armored car full of coins to call cross country to get a connection up front...not enough money,no phonecall.
We were instructed by our parents to cheat the phone company out of their dime by calling our home phone and letting it ring only once as a signal to make the next move that was pre-arranged before you left home.
Our landline connections had the option of local only or another version with a very expensive long distance ability that cost more to run than a moon rocket. The first improvement to this service was the original 800 number that placed the phone charges on the person who you called instead of your bill. That led us to seek businesses who did subscribe to 800 numbers for long distance business..."yeah,they even have an 800 number for a free call"
The original hackers of phones were called phreakers who exploited Ma Bell's use of sound frequencies to signal what lines were to be used to reach proper destinations. The original touch tone phones that replaced pulse rotary dialing signals to make connections used variations of tonal values to signal call routing. An important phreaker was a man named John T Draper who worked with the properties of this service utilizing a cheap Radio Shack touch tone generator called a bluebox to defraud the phone system. He got his nickname of Cap'n Crunch by exploiting a bosun whistle prize from a cereal box. The whistle played a 2600 hertz tone that was the same tone the phone company used to get a long distance connection. This allowed Cap'n Crunch to dial worldwide with no charges using a very simple technique for free. Eventually he got caught by the authorities and the phone company and went on to be known as one of the best phreakers of all time using a crappy toy to do it.
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cap'n crunch in cyberspace
A rather interesting writeup in Cap'n Crunch and his cohort Steve Wosniak of Apple Computer fame
