Yes there will be an episode 12, but not anytime soon. Due to a change in my living situation, I have not been able to produce much recently. I expect things to improve later in 2024 and then we'll see. Episode 12 will be very much like episode 4: Not much of a plot (like the Fred saga), instead just one phone discovery after another, centered around the so-called "party lines." I am also waiting to see if AI voices can be employed to emulate my younger self AND the sound of "party line" voices; If this can be done, it will be a better program.
I’m just a teenager, but I really enjoy these programs. My papaw worked for AT&T from the 60s to the early 2000s. I wish I would’ve asked him more about it before he passed. You don’t always realize what you’ve got until it’s gone. So, thank you for creating these programs and preserving history!
I was just a year or two behind you. I moved from NYC to NJ in early 1972 (January) and that is when my true phone obsession began. I used "Cisco" or "Cisco Kid" and I absolutely remember your name being tossed around.
The party line drama reminds me of all the web forum drama I grew up with: the pranks, invasions, migrations, trolls, cliques, impersonation, doxxing, hacking, social engineering, and so on. Get a lot of teens together without many rules and see what happens...there's often a dark side to it as you pointed out, and also there can be amazing creativity and community in these user-created spaces. It's been incredible to learn about these adventures which are so familiar in many ways, but which happened in a completely different technological realm, and a little closer to physical reality. It's amazing to me that a bunch of kids (and a few "adults") stumbled into a piece of this online future by accident, alongside some of its problems at the same time. (While today any 13 year old can spin up a Discord by filling out a form and pushing a button, without reverse engineering the phone system). Also, even though the concept of "cyberpunk" didn't exist yet, this party line stuff was genuinely cyberpunk -- people living in the spaces in between as an unintended consequence of the technology, "high tech low life" all the way! No brain implants required. It's really something special due to the low barrier to entry, there's a kind of Robin Hood feel to it, giving out advanced technology to whoever felt like using it and trying to stay one step ahead of sheriff Ma Bell. It was a great episode, and I'm looking forward to the next one as always!
These Fred stories are amazing. I miss the days of digging around the phone networks. Even though I was doing this from 1986-1990, it was surely at the tail end of the “good ol days”.
Yeah there was actually a lot to do in the 80s (mostly with your touchtone dial over remote access numbers to dimension PB exes), But I was losing interest at the time
Here's a brief report of what I can recall re: phreaking in the mid to late 1990s: I was born in 1980, and blueboxed for the first time in 1995 or 1996. All of the links I used for seizing trunks were toll-free "country direct" lines. I have no idea who paid for these, but they were 800 numbers that connected to an operator in a foreign country. I suppose they were used for collect and calling card calls, though I really have no idea. To this day, I have never encountered anyone talking about them outside of the context of phreaking. All links I used were CCITT5. Well, there's one exception: I found an 800 number to some business in Ketchikan, AK which used R1 signalling. It was poor quality and most likely satellite, but it did work. I could call inward operators with it and everything. Most of my blue boxing took place on the 800 to Greece, as it had no restrictions on where it could call, and there were no esoteric routing necessary. I could call inward operators in the US, and they hadn't the foggiest idea that I was not an operator.
I also had limited success with 800 (that is, I could at least seize a trunk and dial SOMETHING, sometimes) numbers to Panama, Belize, China, Macau, Argentina, Chile, and probably some others.
By the year 2000, Greece was definitely digital, IIRC. Probably no later than 1998. I had stopped blue boxing around this time because of a mysterious call I got from some number in Morristown, NJ, claiming to be "the phone company" asking if I had problems calling Greece. I suspect it was either the FBI or some other agency, or someone working for AT&T. I had also left for college in 8/98, and girls and all that took precedence. When I had started, countries were already being switched to SS7. By 1998, most of the links I had used had been cut over, IIRC, and so I believe I was probably one of the last blue boxers in the US. At that time, it was way more common elsewhere in the world.
The Fake Fred antic of hooking two phone lines together to confuse and befuddle anyone who answered was done later by a friend of mine's college roommate. Their dorm had a PBX that allowed them to do.... more than they probably should have been able to. One of his best stories was hooking random people together to a random third party. In this case, it was the public libraries recorded storyline. So if you listen to what happens in Evan's excellent recounting starting at about 31:05 you can imagine the chaos. As far as the main topic of these from Evan, I have recordings too but the tapes are so old I would need to be very careful to play back 40-50 year old tapes that were stored "tails out" in the hopes that the oxide doesn't flake off on first playback.
Do you know if your tapes are mylar or acetate? You're probably pretty safe with mylar. Even if lots of oxide is coming off on the playback head- - just keep cleaning it off. But if the tape is acetate, it is very likely to break again and again. There IS a way to deal with this problem which involves literally baking the tape. But I'm no expert on that.
Can't wait for the next program! Who knew that of all people playing a prank on you was ________ , of all people. That's crazy! Talk about a plot twist
13:20 - That "cricket" noise! I used to hear that on shortwave in the 80's. Of all the strange noises I used to hear on SW back then, that one particular sound intrigued me the most. It sounds like some sort of data burst, as if it's expecting a response from something.
I'll give the shortest answer I can, which will likely test the limits of RU-vid's comment feature. In the early 1970s I would go to Puerto Rico, which had an amazing collection of phone equipment, some of which was like mainland independents, while other parts were European, and there were Jane Barbe recordings everywhere. I'd have to go to the UK and France and record as much as possible including freaking. In New York City there are panel tandems of two types that we didn't record nearly enough of. So that would be a huge project as well. Frankly I would not only need a Time Machine, but multiple clones of myself. I would want to go to the 1950s and record the local network in New York City where Manual and dial offices were both in service, and record what it was like to call between them. Then I'd have to survey the 1940s to find out the best time to capture the long distance network when it was all being done by operators. OK that's the short answer…
I bet that guy was also the “Voice of the South,” I cannot wait for the next installment!!! By the way, what is the last song used at the end of the episode?
He wasn't the Voice of the South, but I suspect he WAS the one pretending to be me playing music. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hzJZztwQ0C0.html
@@evandoorbell4278Hey, do you have any more blue boxing recordings? That is really what I'm after. ;-) I would still do it today if it were possible, I think. I would pay to make an international call to just to reach the trunk lol.
I forget if you've mentioned it, but why weren't you using touch tone? Wasn't it fairly common at that point? I'm assuming it was just to save money. I had a service call one time many years ago for a bad jack or something. The elderly people just had a cheap plastic wall phone that was set to pulse. I flipped it to tone, but it wouldn't break dialtone! Called assignment and sure enough, their switch programming never had touch tone enabled in the DMS! 🤣
Touch tone was an expensive luxury in the early 70s, which the majority of people did not have. First time I had it was 1975, and even then I only paid for it on one of my two lines to save money
@@evandoorbell4278 I had to beg my poor mother for touch tone service when I was in the throes of my phone addiction and I did not have a touch tone phone - I had a unique device that replaced the microphone in our regular telephone handset which had a mic as well as touch tone buttons built into the lower cylindrical housing. I used that for years before we got an actual touch tone phone.
Hey Evan, thanks for the continuation of the Doorbell saga - Just curious if you ever tried to find Fred again in recent years, or if you know whatever became of Fred?
omg. chicken delight hahaha “dont cook tonight. call chicken delight!”. listening to this stuff is better than any internet fad out there… its a visceral window into the past.
Evan, or anyone else who might know, do you know which recording has the very old speaking clock recording? There was a sample that ran about two minutes, and you pointed out that it sounded like every announcement was recorded individually, rather than the time being pieced together as it would be on an Audichron. (i.e., "At the tone the time will be 2:49 and 50 seconds... At the tone the time will be 2:50 exactly")
Boy, am I glad I randomly decided to type “Evan Doorbell” into RU-vid today, to find there’s now an episode 11 😍 I’ve been downloading and listening to your tapes from the Phone Trips and Evan-Doorbell sites since 2005. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. I hadn’t checked back in a little while, and I don’t use Twitter anymore, as it’s just a cesspool of right-wing scumbags.
