When I was an electrician apprentice back in the 80's I did minor phone line pulls for people who wanted clean outside walls so I had a lineman's phone.
I lived in a townhouse and my neighbor thought it was fun to have my car towed a few times because he didn't like me.
I located the phone junction box, found his line, clipped in at 1 am or so, called a sex line and asked her to read Alice In Wonderland but substitute his wife's name for Alice. Two hours later she was still going!
@pjohanneson@pluralistic There was one still a real classic one in place at Colter Bay Visitor Center in Grand Teton National Park when we passed through in early October. It was the first I've seen in ages.
They used to be so important when I was a kid on vacation with my parents, travelling in a truck camper. We would find one every few days to call home, alternating between my maternal grandparents and paternal grandmother, with each of them subsequently relaying the details to the other.
@danep@pjohanneson@pluralistic i gave my nephew a campus tour of my alma mater and as we came from the engineering building to the student union i sadly said, “and this was where all the pay phones used to be.” Sad. Memories…people standing in line waiting to check their pager voicemails 😂
@pluralistic no pic, but downtown Calgary there used to be a few public phones around. It's been a few years since I've wandered there due to working from him, but I remember seeing and hearing that most were used by people who didn't otherwise have phoned.
You know, them... The downtrodden, unfortunate soles otherwise looked down on by the likes of my mother and society in general. Phones used to call their family, their support networks, and sure mom, maybe even their dealer.
Now Imagen... /1
@pluralistic Seen similar in Cockfosters Tube Station in the UK. Still illuminated mind. Not sure there are any public phones left in London at this point.
@martijndevrieze@SHODAN@pluralistic BUSINESS STARTUP IDEA: Buy up empty phone booths, slap PV panels on top and a battery/distribution board inside, then rent them out as smartphone fast-charge charging points (with a lock-box to leave your phone in while it's sucking juice at £1/30 minutes).
"It's a phone box. You pay us for permission to leave your phone in it. You're welcome."
@cstross Heh, missed that. I think BT want to get rid of these generally mind, so offloading them to the community to maintain instead seems cynical enough from a certain angle I suppose.
@cstross Hell, maybe I could see if I could buy a working phone from one at some point, see if I could get it working on the mobile network and use it as an alternative for home use only instead of giving out my mobile number.
@SHODAN I had a friend (now dead) who once lifted most of a Strowger exchange from a skip outside a BT building they were re-equipping with System X. He took it home, set it up, added a speaking clock, and put the speaking clock on a premium-rate phone line with a number he could give to people who annoyed him.
@cstross@martijndevrieze@SHODAN@pluralistic Scotland has quite a few derelict blue police boxes scattered about. Some have become coffee houses, one in Edinburgh is a tool loan/exchange, etc.
I'm sure someone creative could see an equivalent use? Charging point for robot police cars in the near future?
@JamesGleick@Dss@pluralistic@martijndevrieze@SHODAN No, but they have electricity and running water (and a sink so the cold copper could brew a mug of tea in the middle of a winter shift). They gradually fell into disuse when the telephone, radio dispatchers, and cars enabled the police to work out of centralized stations rather than patrolling on foot.
@cstross@JamesGleick@Dss@pluralistic@martijndevrieze@SHODAN Though more comfortable for the copper, something has been lost in passing of solo foot patrols being the default. Detachment of the police from the community really makes a mess.
@manu@pluralistic
I knew a guy in the 80s who would make collect calls from Canada to a payphone in France. When his girlfriend answered, she would say she accepted the charges, but the Canadian operator didnt know that there was no such mechanism in France so they would have long free talks at a time when international calls were expensive and neither Skype nor the Internet existed.
Back in the day in Canada, if you made a call from a pay phone without putting change in, you could hear the party you called but they couldn’t hear you. However if you quickly toggled the hang-up lever they would hear a click, so if they were wise to the scheme, you could use the lever to tap out the digits for the payphone’s telephone number (which was posted on the phone) and the other party could then call you back. 😎
@Crispius@DenOfEarth@manu@pluralistic once they got the automated collect calling service, it gave you a few seconds to record your name - or if you spoke quickly, the message your wanted to convey.
Then the person you were calling would get a robot voice saying "you are receiving a collect call from 'it's Jeff come hang out at the library'. Do you accept the charge?"
@Crispius@DenOfEarth@manu@pluralistic As a kid I would call a 1-800 number to get an open line. Once I got the random person I called to hang up, I stayed on the line. The line would remain open and once I got the dial tone I could call to get a ride home from the library. I'm pretty sure I learned this from a random txt file off a BBS or maybe Gopher server I accessed in the library.
@manu@pluralistic
Another early form of (legit, sorry!) free calls was the old Zenith numbers. This predated the 800 toll free lines. You had to call the operator and ask to be connected to the 5-digit number you wanted.
A company I worked for in the 80s still had a Zenith number published in the white pages even though it had long been disconnected. We tried calling it and were greeted with a very suspicious "and WHO are you trying to reach???" - we hung up.
@DenOfEarth@manu@pluralistic Is this something different from the abbreviations they used to use for all phone numbers? They used to use the letters associated with the digits as a quick code for operators - for instance, in Central New York there was an exchange that began 756 or 753: those numbers were referenced as 'Skyline', so to call 756-8413 (made up number, do not call!) You would ask the operator for 'Skyline 6-8413'.
According to the Wikipedia article, Zenith numbers were so called because the letter Z was on the number zero, which would take you to the operator you needed in the first place.
@Geoff@DenOfEarth@manu@pluralistic in the late 90’s/early 00’s in the USA my friends and I all memorized the numbers of payphones near each others’ houses so when we wanted to hang out we could place a bunch of collect calls to each other for free to see who was also hanging out near a payphone. Good times. Futel.net is a cool modern project to bring some payphones back to life
In the mid-90s, there was an "engineer" code on some payphones you could use that would return the last coin put in, at the end of the call, so you'd use a 10p to set the call up and check it worked*, and then repeatedly use a £1 coin to extend the call. Cue endless lines at the University payphones as everyone made half-hour calls.
(*something like that, anyway - my memories of university are admittedly hazy)
There was a recording that i listened to in the early 1990's, called the Sounds Of Britain.
When rotary phones were still a thing, the exchanges used a similar mechanism. You could hear the clicks as the mechanism operated.
If you started dialling an adjacent area code before the first one had finished dialling through, so as long as you knew the numbers, you could dial all the way around the coastline of Britain, and then dial your own phone number. :D
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