That should help.

We recently told our daughter what a phone book was. She was flabbergasted.

Ohhh man! I was just a few years too late for that but I remember reading and hearing about it. It was a dream of mine! Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it.

I'd be very surprised if this wasn't accidental given the character of this site, but holy moly is the pun fitting. Congrats.

I think you mean red box. Red boxing was when you generated, or just recorded/played back the tones for different coins. The idea was to trick the phone into thinking you put in money. We only had one customer owned payphone we knew about that it worked on, but it was glorious.(even though we had noone to call)

A beige box is a telephone cable with alligator clips on the one end. You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also use it on any telephone line.

If some COCOT's were also susceptible to red-boxing, that's something we never discovered. To be fair though, it never even occurred to me to check. I just had it burned into my brain at some point that red-boxing was for telco phones and not COCOT's.[1] In hindsight, that was quite possibly folklore that was wrong.

You could ofcourse use it on a COCOT, but you could also use it on any telephone line.

Yep. It just worked out that a convenience store in the middle of nowhere with a COCOT out in the parking lot was a good scenario for doing this kind of thing without getting caught. Or so I'm told... :-)

[1]: https://www.tech-faq.com/red-box.html

There is one still operating in the parking lot of a general store in a tiny, tiny town near me. I keep wanting to put an old-school modem on my laptop, paying it a visit, and dial up a BBS (a few of those still exist, too), just for old time's sake and maybe a nostalgia overdose.

This might be one of the most important historical pricing repositories that track tech trends ever produced when it's done. Imagine tracking the weekly per-MB prices of hard drives or even more volatile DRAM from 1979 to 2009. And then there's tracking the emergence and transition between technologies, correlation against production yield information, corporate histories...this could be a backbone all other North American computer history could be hung off of.

It's a time long gone, but 2009 wasn't that long ago, and reaching from the beginning of personal computing to then is an amazing thing.

edit: wow, and I mean wow the results look great https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-february-1986/C...

edit2: WHAT, THEY'RE ALSO OCR'd???!?!?! Holy Fuck

edit3: if you don't, you should listen to Jason's podcast, it really helps get into the mind of an amazing human https://www.youtube.com/@jasonscott526

from http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5251

In a world where people are rushing to pump out AI generated content, polluting the internet, all for a buck - people like Jason also exist. What a gem of a person!

That's not really possible with the wretched things we call "browsers" today - Heck, even with a high-bandwidth connection and a nice 4K screen to display it, I still can't nearly as readily flip through pages of the IA Computer Shopper scans as I could through the actual physical media. Browsing, along with its attendant and deliberate page-turning to move on to something new, have been replaced by endless scrolling of sameness. The Ads are all dynamic, so even though they're the things that catch your eye the most, they're not usable as navigation context markers anymore - note how different all the ads were, and how the uniqueness page layout became something a litlte bit memorable, so you could more easily flip back to re-find something you'd read a few dozen pages back.

Browsing is an excellent quick, easy way to MAKE CONNECTIONS between lots of different data coming from lots of different sources. That sort of thing created much more well-rounded, smarter people, and society is poorer for having moved to overly structured media. (And ads are media, too (heck they're nearly all of Computer Shopper) - just try going back to find an ad you saw on a site last week!) Static location context matters - humans are wired to think in terms of physical relativity, and our UIs give that up only at great cost...

Where's the fun in that? Building your own PC is a thrill - budgeting, chosing components, excitedly waiting for each to arrive or picking them from shelf, assembling everything and then pressing the power button to power everything up for the first time. Followed by your heart sinking when nothing happens "ohfuckohfuckohfuck, did I I just burn something out - there isn't any smoke, but I hope it's not the processor". Reseat everything, reconnect cables, get an some sign of life, but it's an error code - progress. Multiple attempts at fixing the error and finally get a POST screen. Apple can't sell that emotional experience or sense of ownership - self-built machines have a personality.

The extra RAM and/or cores I get from a self-build vs. equally priced Apple computer is just a bonus. Modern standards make surprise incompatibilities less likely than in the past, looking at the specs works 99.9% of the times

I honestly had to laugh at the lack of progress in the area.

[0] https://pcpartpicker.com/list/

I don't miss it!

Parts compatability isn't really too hard. Pull up the mobo specs and make sure your ram timings, CPU socket, PCI, and power demand all line up.

That said, if any of you oldheads have links to such things, do share - always curious to learn more about the beige age. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug and I’m here for that secondhand.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984598.Masters_of_Decept...

And this kind of writing is so fucking annoying, that I wish I had more karma to downvote it. If you can't write "fucking amazing", please don't use those replacements either.

I know my comment is off-topic to the discussion, but no more off-topic than a comment discussing a CSS style of a post instead of its content, so I think it would be fine.