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... :-)
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.
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.