Ring And Busy Signals. By Evan Doorbell 

On Illinois Bell in the early '70s you dialed 91911, hang up and every phone in the house rang. Great intercom system if you had a big house like we had. Dial 91918 and it would ring 3 times like in England! 91917 and it would ring continuously until you answered it! Drove my dad nuts with this one! He wasn't aware of these tricks!

I still like and watch this video 12 years later

Asian Circuitry is this the same guy who does PLA?

what?? you made a bluebox as a child? i call bs

You could buy a cheap tone generator from Tandy or just record tones to a cassette deck. Among over ways

@@Tangobaldy never thought of that

Phone Phreaking is actually a federal crime today. Because it is linked to espionage rings around the world.

@@kreuner11 I didn't have tone generator or a blue box or anything like that. What we did have was a party-line, as we lived a few miles outside of town where three or four houses shared the same telephone line. On a party-line, you would make a long-distance phone call by dialing 1+area code (if different from yours)+phone number. A live operator would break in and ask, "Your number please?" You would then give her your telephone number for billing purposes and the call would then complete (you were charged direct-dialed rates even though it required operator-assistance). In telephone technology terms, this was known as CAMA, which stands for Centralized Automatic Message Accounting (When I was about 11 years old, I started giving the operator a telephone number within our exchange that wasn't assigned to anyone and the operator, not knowing this, would still complete the call. Thus, the call got charged to a non-active telephone number. I got away with this for a long time, until the local phone company began converting rural party-lines to private lines. After this, no operator was required to obtain your billing telephone number, so I could no longer defraud like this.

We were never allowed to say "Off the hook"

That's interesting. Where you an operator? What were you supposed to say instead? What I meant was they could tell one if the other party was talking to someone else or the busy signal was the result of the phone was off its cradle.

​@Waterlec Although the equipment of the era, to which you're referring was more electromechanical in nature, than electronic, I believe there was still some ‘flavor’ of audio level conditioning. In essence, the telephone network employed equipment, which attempted to maintain a certain volume level, for consistency & intelligibility. When you connected the guitar amplifier’s output to the microphone leads of the telephone handset, I suspect it simply overdrove the phone, to the point of distortion. The equipment in the Central Office would have attempted to level the signal coming in, and ‘clipped’ the peaks. By the time it reached the person on the other end, they would have heard a rather loud & distorted sound on their end of the call, but a significantly lower signal, than that of which the guitar amp was producing. Just the same, I’m sure their ears were ringing, after experiencing your guitar solo via the land line. 😊

Your neighbors would more likely hear the guitar as cross talk when using there phones.

I think the Bell System sold their old switching systems to 3rd world countries!

Johnstown, PA, York, PA & Erie, PA were also GTE!

Officer Gregory Stevens That's the British ringback tone. I'm pretty sure it's still the same. What's also cool about that song is that there's a real AT&T phone operator dialing "Pink's" home, and you can hear the old long distance tones.

"See he keeps hanging up. And it's a man answering"

It was the same in parts of Pittsburgh starting in 1975!

Interesting - the New CDO was also the ring for Swannanoa, North Carolina, which also was a 686 exchange, in 704 back then (828 now). My grandparents lived up there, and their ring was New CDO, and it was doubled, left over from the old party lines, I suppose.

+alterman156 That was before Northern came in and DOMINATED

+alterman156 Many of the exchanges you listed were crossbar 5 offices and never never cut to ESS. For example, in the early 80s Chappaqua went from Step by Step to DMS-100. ( first digital switch in Westchester not ESS) Tarrytown (XB5) went to DMS on Nov 15 1984. Scarsdale and Dobbs Ferry (both XB5) followed soon after. By the late 1980 all switches in Westchester went digital ( either DMS or 5E). I only listed a few of the offices I am sure of this because I worked for NY Tel as a crossbar 5 switchman in many of the exchanges you listed.

I lived in Putnam County. 914 area code too

Which possession of the demo were you trying to refer to but left out?

Or in jargon, NPA NXX

King Pin

How could an Alabama tandem serve Indiana customers back then?

Lol

allan egleston Yes, in early days, the busy signal was just dial tone put on and off. Not common in 80's and virtually impossible to find today.

@@MilesCallisto At least in the US, Many countries still use electromechanical switches.

Imperial, PA & Oakdale, PA had it

Evidently at least in the beginning, the busy signals were just the dial tone broken up.

Ryan Becker I'm pretty sure they're the identifying/standardized codes for each type of ring.

Ryan Becker he is saying the area code and prefix.

MrJacMac1986 why would he?

@@Legend813a for phone tapping

I thought SF and Oakland evolved from panel and crossbar, not step. Were there step offices also, and if so, where were they?

Loved #5 crossbar, they always had the larger local calling area, my town was step by step & had a shitty 5 mile radius local calling area. Most places were toll calls