
Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes - unimpressive
http://www.evan-doorbell.com/production
======
unimpressive
This is the personal site of Evan Doorbell, who was one of the big phone
phreaks in the 70's along with people like Mark Bernay. He recorded all the
old telephone sounds and put them into different series where he explains how
the old telephone system worked.

His "How Bell Became a Phreaker" tapes are where I first encountered the genre
of "Hacker stories that start at the beginning." and it's still one of my
favorites even though it's incomplete.[0]

Some notable tapes in this collection:

How Evan Doorbell became a Phone Phreak, parts 1 through 6 (Incomplete)

Phreaks from Esquire article on "052" conference, parts 1 and 2 (January,
1972) [ _The Secrets of The Little Blue Box_ esquire article[1]]

MF Boogie numbers one and two (Music made from phone tones, actually composed
on an electronic organ during a conference call with NPR reporters. [2])

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452591)

[1]:
[http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/rosenbaum1971.pdf](http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/rosenbaum1971.pdf)

[2]: Lapsley, Phil. _Exploding the Phone, The Untold Story of The Teenagers
and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell_. New York: Grove Press, 2013. 230.

~~~
L_Rahman
Any other recommendations in the genre of "Hacker stories that start at the
beginning"?

~~~
dbarlett
Clifford Stoll's _The Cuckoo 's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of
Computer Espionage_ [http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-
Espionage/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-
Espionage/dp/1416507787)

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Animats
If you're building fault-tolerant systems, understanding how #5 Crossbar
worked is still worthwhile. That was the peak of electromechanical telephony,
and understanding how it dealt with faults is valuable. There are multiple
resources available for almost everything - originating registers (which
receive dial pulses), senders (which forward call info to other exchanges),
markers (the brains of the system, with two self-checking halves), and
specialized resources such as trouble recorders and billing punches. As a call
progresses, resources are "seized" for a short period, then released. Resource
seizure normally rotates through the resource or is random, for load
balancing.

If something goes wrong, there's one retry, with different resources than the
first time around. Then the call is abandoned. If the failure rate is 1% per
attempt (remember, this is all done with electromechanical relays), the
failure rate on two tries is 0.01%. Retry after two failures probably has a
cause other than a transient error, and results in seizure of a trouble
recorder, which dumps the state of the call into a specialized punched card.

In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical exchange was
ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural
disaster. This record was not maintained in the computer era.

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b6
Wow. I'm completely floored at how deep this person got into the world of
phones. I was also obsessed with phones for a while, and consider my ears my
favored input channel, but I didn't take 10 steps to this guy's marathon.
Memorizing tons of specific rings and dialtones, recognizing weird audio
quirks of specific switches, etc. This is amazing. No matter what you study,
there always seems to be as much detail as you have the time and energy to
appreciate.

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idlewords
This guy has a beautiful speaking voice. I'm sure it didn't hurt when it came
to social engineering his way around the phone network.

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Aloha
Here is an even more extensive set of recordings:

[http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/](http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/)

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antoinek
He's got a great voice, and explains it very well. The large repository of
clips, finished or not, is very impressive.

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razster
I enjoyed the Z ZZ ZZZ dial a joke line one. Thanks for posting.

