Im 21 and work a job that frequently involves phone calls. To hear the quality of a phone from before i was even a concept. The phone quality is so much better. Now with discord and video calls the audio is decent if not very clear. but the regular phone app on every phone and its network are a huge step back in quality for the sake of the convenience of calling anywhere
Hey Evan! Ex Long Islander here. I played with the phones in the 60's and early 70's on LI as you did. I am a phone freak now, working 555 in my living room and a bunch of phones from the good old days. Did you ever pick up the receiver and wait for the dial tone to end then get connected to a party line? Boy oh boy did I do that often.
Hello again Mr. Doorbell, i'm Daniel, we talked through email a few days ago, in your message you gave me an email where i can send you some recordings however i was informed by the google postmaster that the email does not exist. I would have used the website contact form again but for some reason it stopped working. Can you please send me either here or on my email your mail again?
I appreciate your optimism, but no, that dream was not the viewing of anything actual. It was SYMBOLIC of the Vancouver tandem. What I saw were composited images from my personal past, EG the room itself was based on part of a church I visited once in Washington DC. During 1986 and 1987 I spent several weeks at the Monroe Institute, which included sitting down with Robert Monroe and Joe McMonagle, so take it from me, this wasn’t one of those. Interesting, however, that you thought of that while not knowing (consciously) that I’d been to the Monroe Institute :-)
Hi Evan! I need a piece of advice from you: do you think is it still worthy buying a radio that captures short waves? I have one, but it's not working well anymore and furthermore nowadays it's hard to find a technician to repair it. Another doubt I have is that even if there are still a few or even plenty of such radios, do they broadcast towards South America? You may. I may look foolish ( though I think that you as a DX lover like me will understand me.. ), but I would be satisfied if I can listen at least that mixture of oscilating sounds, ( fade in, fade out? Sorry but I don't know how this is called...). This is very important for me, a kind of a happy journey back to good old days. My best thanks in advance for your attention. Greeting from Belo Horizonte, capital city of the state of Minas Gerais, South East of Brazil!
I am actually the wrong person to ask, because I haven’t tried listening to shortwave since the 1980s. One thing to consider is that all the computer equipment will be causing a whole other layer of interference, so It may be more difficult than ever to get good shortwave reception.
My German father also was fluent in French and I grew up hearing him listen to a lot of shortwave in those languages. He had a Heathkit early on and later upgraded to a Drake SPR-4 with customizable crystals. We always had the most accurate clocks and watches in the neighborhood because he'd tune in regularly to the Greenwich Mean Time station.
To this day I can still time seconds perfectly, because of having listened to the time stations that click or beep once per second all through the late 60s
All of the quirks about the routing situation from the fire, _after_ they decommissioned Suburban, makes me wonder how much worse it would have been had this happened in 1974 or earlier.
Had this happened in 1974 it would have been worse but still manageable because the trunks to the outgoing sector tandem EXISTED, and the route could be manually changed. Before 1974, the panels would have had to create whole new trunk groups to replace suburban.
Woohoo! My guess was correct as to what was causing the issues with routing, once i went back and listened to program 1. Still looking forward to finding out exactly *why* those routes were used, but yay for intuitive reasoning.
Thank you, Evan. Always good to hear some review of technical notes: So-- supervision test does not "off hook" long enough to charge for the call? I guess because that's not what it's testing?
Right. As long as the light goes, "Flash flash, flash... flash flash solid" then it's working OK. (There are several other tests it makes before it starts flashing answer supervision.) The telco ALSO had something called a "charge test," which DID test for that. The charge tests were common in Bell California areas. Southern cal. program 1 has one at about 15:15
Its always so surreal to me when hearing panels with modern dialtone. I just instinctively think of panels as such an old switch its so cool that they used them for so long in the network.
For some reason, all of the panels in Manhattan had modern dial tone, even though none of them had any kind of DTMF. In the outer boroughs the panels all had legacy dial tone. The last NYC panel, WAdsworth 3-7-8, ran until 1979.
Did you manage to capture recordings of the panel just before it was taken out of the network? If not, what’s the last panel recordings in your archives?
@@arfy ben spent many more hours standing at payphones recording panels then I did. It was all done from 1974 to 1978. There would be no way to record it once it’s been taken out of the network, so yes, there were some last minute recording sessions. I don’t know which panel was recorded last, but I can tell you that Wadsworth 3- 7-8 was the last panel in New York, disconnected in 1979
Listening to this makes me want to rewatch 1975s Three Days Of The Condor where Robert Redford's character evades the phone trace by the CIA by infiltrating a Bell CO and tying sections of a switch together to throw them off his trail. The phone tracer in the wheelchair known as The Major yells out that the SOB wired together 50 phones, everyone in Brooklyn is talking to each other.
Also, PLEASE think about somehow collaborating with the Connections Museum in Seattle?? Imagining their Panel frames in action while listening to this made it really come alive... It would be awesome to take some sections of your recordings and film the CM's switch(es) doing the same actions, and then edit/sync them together. Or interview each other or something. Have you ever been there? I plan to go in the near future.
I've been there; Feels like coming home. ANYONE who isn't using my audio in a misleading way, IS welcome to sync it to pictures. I won't have time, because I ALREADY don't have enough time to produce all the audio I have here to share. What I'd like to see first, is someone syncing my discussion with Martin at the Maine Museum, to video from there.
I would wholeheartedly love to see Evan go to the Seattle museum and do a video series, with a phone patch. Just to talk through the sounds and process.
HIBAPP is like over 20 years old now I think, but I don't think the identity of the other Long Island teenager has ever been revealed in any of the other episodes. I have always wondered who it was and when and how the parallel paths in the same jungle from him and ED met up?
Thanks! (You like my humor? I don’t hear THAT very much :-)) I have digitized all my 70s cassettes, but I didn’t finish that process until 2017. Amazingly, almost none of the tapes degraded at all! The cassette shells themselves degraded, but by taking the tape out and putting them in new shells, I was able to play all but two of them in perfect quality. I STILL have all the cassettes and they still sound great.
Thanks a lot for sharing. These sounds are kind of magic to my ears and I miss them a lot. I grew up listening to short wave radios and they are on the top of my most representative and beloves memories. Missing those times when the world seemed much larger, and the oscilating sounds coming from 'so far' made me dream of one day I could travel around the world and visiting all those places where those broadcadtings came from. I think that nowadays with all this technology things, though became much more affordable, are a little bit boring. Everything is fast, near, now, there is no magic anymore. Maybe I'm an oldfashioned one...All the best from Belo Horizonte city, state of Minas Gerais, South East of Brazil...
Thanks for commenting! Yes, there was indeed something magic about hearing something coming from overseas over short wave. After that, I got into the telephone network and began hearing something similar about long-distance phone calls.
At 53.40 that is definitely a British number unavailable tone, heard a lot of that when you left your phone off the hook and got permanent glow, after a while that also cut off ... I think you also got it sometimes when trunks were busy or a number was out of order
I should get my compilations together. My recordings include what I used to think were all cosmic static. My oldest was recorded on May 19th, 1973. There was a baseball game in these recordings I was able to track this game, being able to date it. It was my brother's receiver and used to sneak into his room and played with it at 13 years of age, a truly magical time for me. All the rest were recorded during the mid to late 1980s, including many of the same interval signals, which I always assumed these identified their stations. Most of my work recordings were made using automobile batteries (didn't have electricity in those days in the forests of Central Maine in my cabin.) It wasn't all about the static, but the unconventional music I loved far beyond the regular modern American radio of that period. The set here is far more organized with identifier narrations and have helped me understand short wave much better, including some of those same sounds from my radio set. I tended to tune in like I did regular radio, but with far more real adventures into these astounding meter bands. I am happy to have captured mine own sets on cassette tapes! It would be awesome if more people would bring their own recordings of these truly historic broadcasts to be enjoyed and relived.
On the AIS report at about 2:22, if you crank the volume and listen carefully, you can make out *The Barking Dogs of Jane* as mentioned in Evan's telephone network sounds tapes.
I live in Vancouver canada and I will never forget the recording we had on pay phones in the 80's, the deepest voice that sounded like a robot would say,"The call you've made requires a 25 cent deposit. Please hang up now and try your call again. This is a recording from the steveston exchange cs1" i wish i could find that exact recording!
It will likely live on only in your memory. That was probably a recording only found in certain specific places, and probably there was no one there like me to record it.
Hampsteadization! I love it! I can remember as a young kid / phreaker, when the Baltimore 4A got "Hampsteadized" --- I was getting different recordings when calling vacant codes in other states.
Funny story about the 3012 lady: she used to pronounce the word “ask” as, “Aysk.” Finally they told her to say, “request assistance from your operator, “Instead of, “ask your operator for assistance. “
