Lloyd,
Do you remember a guy in Des Moines by the called of WA0KMC? I forget his
name at the moment but he had a device that when you called him long
distance, it kept his phone ringing at the phone company. I called him once
just to see if it worked and talked to him for an hour on my ham shack
personal phone. I never got a bill.
Phil.
K0NX
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lloyd Rasmussen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, May 02, 2015 8:03 PM
Subject: Re: Before There Was Caller I D
>A blue box was a device that produced the correct frequency and sequences
>to
> fool the phone network into passing long-distance calls for free, and
> doing
> other mischief. We may have discussed this on this listserv before. NLS
> BARD
> has a 2011 book, "Exploding the Phone", which goes into a lot of detail
> about people who were phone phreaks, including some who were blind. It was
> scary to note that I had met or read e-mail from about 6 of these folks.
> 73,
>
> Lloyd Rasmussen, W3IUU, Kensington, MD
> http://lras.home.sprynet.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phil Scovell
> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 11:57 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Before There Was Caller I D
>
> Jim,
>
> Is a blue box one of those devices way back when that allowed you to call
> long distance for free?
>
> Phil.
> K0NX
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Miller" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 5:03 AM
> Subject: Re: Before There Was Caller I D
>
>
>> Jim, as I recall there were a couple people on this list, I forget who
>> they
>> were, it's been a while since it came up but I think we had a couple of
>> them
>> on this list at one time.
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jim Gammon" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2015 1:12 AM
>> Subject: Re: Before There Was Caller I D
>>
>>
>>> Wow Phil, you was one bad boy! Glad I wasn't your friend back
>>> then. We might have gotten into some big trouble together. Were
>>> you one of those Blue Box guys? You don't have to answer that. I
>>> was not. 73, Jim WA6EKS
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: Phil Scovell <[log in to unmask]
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Date sent: Tue, 21 Apr 2015 20:34:08 -0600
>>> Subject: Before There Was Caller I D
>>>
>>> School was out and to the best of my knowledge, this happened in
>>> 68 or 69.
>>> Two teenage blind friends of mine were talking on 75 sideband
>>> late at night;
>>> probably about midnight or a little after. My roommate from the
>>> school for
>>> the blind was spending a few days with me in Omaha. He lived in
>>> a small
>>> town 35 miles west of me. I was tuning around the band as my
>>> friend and I
>>> were talking in my combination bedroom hamshack when I came
>>> across our two
>>> buddies from school. We sat and listened to them rag chewing for
>>> awhile and
>>> then I got an idea. Using my own private line my mom let me
>>> have, because I
>>> was running a lot of phone patches, you understand, and because I
>>> simply was
>>> able to talk my mom into it, I dialed one of the guy's home phone
>>> numbers,
>>> letting it ring once, and then hanging up. A minute or so later,
>>> I dialed
>>> the other guy's number, letting it ring once, and then hanging
>>> up. They
>>> both commented on their phones ringing. I did it again and then
>>> again.
>>> Eventually, they figured out something was wrong so they took the
>>> phone off
>>> the hook because, they said, they didn't want their parents to
>>> wake up. A
>>> few minutes later, they reported on the air that they were
>>> putting their
>>> phones back on the hook so my finger, using a touch tone phone of
>>> all
>>> things, dialed them up yet again. Finally, they said they were
>>> leaving
>>> their phones off the hook for the rest of the night. Never once
>>> did they
>>> put two and two together and my friend and I never told them what
>>> we had
>>> done. However, and this is the funny part, a couple days later,
>>> I was
>>> talking to one of these guys and he said, "Man, did I screw
>>> something up big
>>> time." I asked him what he was talking about. He told me about
>>> someone
>>> ringing his phone in the middle of the night but he said, instead
>>> of taking
>>> the phone off the hook for the rest of the night, he shorted the
>>> two phone
>>> patch leads together which grounded out their phone. He promptly
>>> forgot
>>> about it. The next day, the telephone company came and asked to
>>> check out
>>> their phones and phone wiring because they had traced down a
>>> neighborhood
>>> short to their house. So my friend had shorted out an entire
>>> neighborhood.
>>> No, are you crazy? I never, to this day, told either one of my
>>> friends who
>>> had dial their phone in the middle of the night; especially since
>>> one had
>>> screwed up half the little town he was living in at that time.
>>> Don't you
>>> tell anybody either. Of course, that couldn't work as well today
>>> with
>>> caller I D. Oh, sure, you could block your call, I guess, but
>>> don't rain on
>>> my parade.
>>>
>>> Phil.
>>> K0NX
>>
>
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