plapsley

+1 to this! If you have any interest in telephones, telephone switching, or phreaking, this place is incredible. And the people who run it are awesome.

Thanks for the kind words! And it's funny, when I saw this story on HN my first thought was "loop arounds and talkable busy signals!" :-).

I just came back from the The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) in the UK at Bletchley Park. It was fantastic. They have a wide variety of working systems that you can play with, from home computers to mainframes, as well as Bombes and the Colossus (used to break the Lorenz cipher), and WITCH. Very cool. https://www.tnmoc.org/

Quasi-related: If you're into old telephone switching equipment (some of which is computer-based), the Connections Museum in Seattle is not to be missed.

This is such a great site. Any of Evan Doorbell's "How I Became a Phone Phreak" or "Sounds of Long Distance" are especially great.

Rachael Morrison and her team poured their heart into this and it shows... it is just so good. (Disclaimer: I was interviewed for the movie and narrate parts of it.) See it if you can.

Rachael Morrison, the director, was kind enough to invite me to the premier at Sundance, since she interviewed me for the film. She and her crew did an amazing job. She found so much archival material and she and her team stitched it together to tell a moving and historically accurate story. People were in tears after the premier. Just so good.

Hey Fogus! A few links or resources you might enjoy:

* Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing, 1945: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nootd1945.pdf

* General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service, 1930: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/gspts1930.pdf

* (Book) Engineering and Operations in the Bell System, 1984: https://bitsavers.org/communications/westernElectric/books/E...

* (Shameless plug) My book on the history of phone phreaking, Exploding the Phone, which has a lot of stuff on Engressia in it: https://explodingthephone.com/

Also, there is a documentary film coming up at Sundance about Engressia! https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fad21a5535277... Very excited to see it!

That's awesome, thank you!

Evan's stuff is excellent and worth watching/listening to.

Shameless plug: if you like his stuff, you might also like my book, "Exploding The Phone", which is a history of phone phreaking. https://explodingthephone.com/

Evan narrated the Audible version. :-)

Thanks for the mention and honored to be in the same mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!

CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5

SS5 was derived from AT&T's US MF signaling system, described in "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching" by Breen and Dahlbom, Bell System Technical Journal, November 1960. PDF here: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf

The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.

Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. <shameless plug> If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com </shameless plug>

Oh yeah. Something I was so interested in, I wrote a history book about it: https://explodingthephone.com/

If you like old documents, check out, e.g., https://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=captain+crunch&so...

Someone mentioned phrack above. There was (still is!) also 2600, and before that, YIPL/TAP, the original phone phreak newsletter: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91

If you get up Seattle way ever, be sure to check out the Connections Museum, where you can see not just old telephones, but old telephone switching equipment, lovingly maintained by some amazing people: https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ They have an amazing youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/c/connectionsmuseum

If you want something really ancient, check out YIPL/TAP, which was the first phone phreak newsletter (started publishing in May 1971) that was the granddaddy of 2600. You can get it on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91

Thank you, appreciate the plug! :-)

Thanks!

Thank you!

Thanks for the kind words, they mean a lot!

That's a very kind question, thanks! In terms of what I get in the end, it doesn't really matter where you buy it (e.g., Amazon, local bookstore, whatever), although I'd love it if you supported your local bookstore -- they need help! Format matters a bit more in terms of royalty percentage (I get a higher percentage on ebooks)but ebooks also are priced lower, so the net to me between paperback and ebook is not much different.

Thanks for the heads up! I'll attend to that!

Shameless plug for my book on the history of the subject, for those interested: https://explodingthephone.com/

Author of Exploding The Phone here, thanks for the mention and glad you enjoyed it! One thing I did that I'm pretty proud of is that I put almost all the research documents that I dug up (FOIA, newspaper articles, etc.) up on my website, where you can dig through them. E.g.: http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=blue+box&sort=rele... (please pardon the lack of https!) And to the other commenter about Evan Doorbell's excellent tapes about phone phreaking: I was lucky enough to get Evan to narrate the Audible version of my book!

Shameless plug for my book on the history of phone phreaking: "Exploding The Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell". Plus tons of original research documents here: http://explodingthephone.com/

A blog post related to Project MF from, gosh, 15 years ago: https://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2008/07/business-ca...

Thank you!

Great story! :-)

Phone freak (with an f) was the original term, in the late 1960s. When Ron Rosenbaum wrote "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" he made it into "phone phreak". "Phreaker" came a bit later (1980s is about right). Shameless plug -- I wrote a history book about this whole subject, "Exploding the Phone": https://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Phil-Lapsley/dp/08021... My website, such as it is, offers additional goodies, including lots of scans of original docs like FBI files: http://explodingthephone.com/ If you want more on Captain Crunch, see http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=draper&sort=releva...

His "How Evan Doorbell Became a Phone Phreak" series is fantastic: http://www.evan-doorbell.com/production/#phonephreak

His voice is dreamy. And, he was kind enough to narrate the audible version of "Exploding The Phone", my history of phone phreaking: https://www.audible.com/pd/Exploding-the-Phone-Audiobook/B00...

Draper was definitely not first hacker ever arrested, but perhaps "first hacker sentenced to prison." (Ralph Barclay, inventor of the blue box used for phone phreaking, was arrested in 1961 or so, almost a decade before Draper came on scene. When I interviewed him I said, "You were the first!" He laughed and responded, "Well, first to get caught, maybe.") http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx0575.pdf or more generally http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=barclay&sort=relev...