Re:GPT-3 fails horribly, then I coax it into figuring out ho...
by aliraheem on Sunday July 10, 2022 @09:50AM
(#32044767)
You might have been up against a ground start phone line.[1] Apparently, some designs gave access to the powered wired from the phone line, and grounding this would trigger the dial tone from upstream.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_start
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.dcom.telecom/c/weJ0FW0Njb4
Re:GPT-3 fails horribly, then I coax it into figuring out ho...
by thelightherder on Sunday July 10, 2022 @11:07AM
(#32045437)
Not sure about any of that - there was always a dial tone. But, what they had done with these phones was not let any sound from the mouthpiece go into the phone until all the appropriate coins were inserted. You could tell right away if it was a phone that this would work on or not by blowing into the mouthpiece. If you heard the wind sound in the earpiece, it would work, if no sound was picked up by the mouthpiece, it would not work.
Around 1992 I read about being able to replace the crystal in one of those little phone dialer things you could get at Radio Shack with one of a different megahertz to change the pitch of the DTMF sound so that pressing one of the numbers would make the nickel sound (I ordered this little part from Mouser Electronics). You would program the device to make five in a row to simulate the quarter. It was a bit more convenient than the little tape recorder (but, the downside of this technique is that if an operator was listening, it sounded obviously fake). A bit later I recorded the quarter sound from the tape to one of those little key fob recorders for even more convenience.
When I moved to Florida in 1993 this technique didn't work on most of the payphones around - I guess it was the start of payphone deregulation, and these phones had the mouthpiece disabled until the money was put in and the call was put through, so the sounds could not be played through it. There were a couple AT&T payphones around, and the technique did still work on those. I think around 1997 was the last time I successfully used this technique.