So I mentioned this video to my father: "I'm watching a video on telephone phreaking", and his first question was: "did he mention a guy named Captain Crunch? I had math with him" Small world huh

“None of the questions were audible” Pro-tip for anyone taking questions from an audience: Repeat the question. Not just for recordings but for the rest of the audience who couldn’t hear it.

One thing he didn't mention was calling someone right back. I found out if you prank call the operator and hang up, they can ring you right back. I figured out how that worked. One day, a female friend from high school had some creep calling her and breathing heavy. She didn't know what to do and told me at school. One day we are at her place and the creep called. I wrote to her to keep him on the line for a few seconds. I then picked up an extension and in a deep voice said, "Thank you miss. We have traced the call and know where he is." The guy hung up. I used the tone to call right back. I told the guy we were the police, we had traced the call, knew where he was and would be sending a squad car around shortly. He was panicking and crying. We told him if he was truly sorry and never did it again, we'd let him off this time. He never called back. haha.

In the early days of phreaking there was a blind kid with perfect pitch and he could whistle his own tones perfectly without using any boxes.

2019: I have unlimited long distance and I don’t call anyone

black box for file transfer: phone company: "this phone has been ringing for an extremely long time....."

Ah, the 80's. The age when computer networks were growing, and had no security whatsoever.

Made a blue box from scratch in the 70's after a ridiculous amount of research when instead I should have been studying Maxwell's equations. Took many attempts to get the tones right, but then to my delight, my girlfriend in Newport RI answered her dorm phone. Felt like superman. That first batch of electronics was bigger than a shoebox. Then, made version 2, which was hand held size and ran on 2 9V batteries. No computers, just analog circuits and bunch of red push button switches. Brought it to college parties and everyone would take turns calling home for free in disbelief. "But we don't have a touchtone phone here..." Didn't matter, I could call anywhere from any phone. Then, figured out I could hack into overseas senders and do stupid things like get the time in Sydney Australia or the weather in London. Buddy and me would cram into an off the beaten path phone booth to perform these antics just in case "they" were on to me. I didn't want to implicate anyone's home phone. They caught me anyways... Cops let me go, but that ended my phone phreaking career as it was pretty dumb to risk arrest for a $4 phone call. Was indeed big phun.

Computer 1: calls Computer 2 Computer 2: answers phone Computer 1: “:o” Computer 2: “:0” Computer 1: “:)” Computer 1: hangs up.

Interesting stuff. I could have used this when I was younger. When I met my girlfriend in 1979 she lived in Santa Ana, California and I lived in the high desert. I was 14 at the time and had a job throwing news papers which meant I always had a pocket full of quarters. I remember walking to the gas station about a mile away to use their pay phone to call my new love. For 80 cents we could talk for 10 minutes. It never seemed long enough to me. Today it blows my mind to see 14 year olds carrying $400 smartphones and the parents paying a monthly service for those kids. You realize what I could have done with that kind of money when I was 14? By the way, 40 years later, the girl that cost me 80 cents a night to talk to is now my wife of 36 years.

I discovered a method for certain payphones in Germany in the 90's, where you would press the hook down about halfway. The line would reset and you'd get a dial tone, but the keypad was blocked because the phone thought you'd hung up. The microphone, however, stayed open and you could dial any number using a DTMF generator like the ones that came with answering machines.

I remember in the 1995 movie Hackers starring Angelina Jolie, each hacker had their own specialty hack that they were really good at. The character Ramon Sanchez specialty was payphone phreaking. He carried around a tape recorder with dial tones playing on it and would put it up to the payphone receiver to call other hackers.

"How Telephone Phreaking Worked" or "How David Spent His Youth Ripping Off the Phone Company" 😅

I like how david smirks after each secret knowing damn well he indulged in all of that " illegal " activity lol.

This brought back memories, thank you. 13:05 Flashback to being a teenager from the 214 zone at Six Flags in Arlington, early 90s. If you met a boy with an 817 number, it was not worth your time, you wouldn’t be able to call him.

To add another story: we did this in Germany too, with tons of different tricks. Funniest one was when one of us who could speak American English called MCI and yelled at them why they changed the calling card test number pretending he keeps testing lines in Germany and they don’t work. The other side replied it’s still 16 times 6 and one seven. This number worked for almost a year for us and we were abusing it heavily. Like in having 20 hour conference calls on those expensive party chat lines.

I still think it's a historical irony that two phreakers created a computer company that eventually started making telephones.

4:07 hearing david say pornographic anime magazine makes me laugh so hard

7:56 Fun fact; Trunk lines continue to exist in networking. Trunks are the connections between switches. They're much more configurable, but we'd have to start discussing vlans to explain why.

18:13 "send the police immediately to investigate that pay phone" I'm thinking the police would give this type of thing a very low priority... unless it's the pay phone outside a donut shop.

"I was also asked to sign a pornographic anime magazine" Madlasses brought some hentai to sign lmao

Minor public speaking tip I learned in a class: During Q&A , try to remember to repeat the question so the rest of the audience can hear it through the mic. It solves the problem you had for the video as well as a bonus!

"pornographic anime magazine" That's one way to call it.

In 1996/97 timeframe I was in the military and we used those MCI cards to call home on the payphones inside of our "dorms" I would lend my code out to others that didn't have one and we stumbled on accident that if you called the number on one payphone and then called the number on another payphone and input your codes at the same time and hung up with one it didn't use any minutes from your card. So I would say about 30 guys probably used one card the entire 6 months I was in technical training so they could call their family's.

Back in the late 60's, I had a cassette recorder microphone on the speaker end of the handset. I had a friend call me from a pay phone and drop some coins in the phone and I recorded the bell dings. I made another recording duplicating many quarter dings. I would make long distance calls from a pay phone, and when the operator dropped in and said to drop in more money to keep the call going, I just played the recording for the quarter dings. It worked!

When I was a kid I learned about this because I had that Captain Crunch whistle, back then a cheap toy was still a toy, and it was pretty durable so I carried it everywhere. There was a kid in our neighborhood who could sometimes whistle the tone that would cause the dial tone to changeover and we all thought that was cool, but one day he took my Captain Crunch whistle and did just as you described, dialed a toll free number and used the whistle to make it reset. We would stay up entire weekends prank calling random numbers all over the country. I was fascinated, just calling someone a state away was unheard of because of the cost, but we were talking to anyone we wanted to anywhere in the country. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen until I saw a live chatroom. Halcyon years.

Brings back memories of my teenage years, I was no hacker, but I was a bbser, and bbs sysop many times.

Worked for the local telco when I was 19 years old. Accompanied the guy who emptied the coins from pay phones. The bag of coins he took back to the central office always had a lot of pennies shaved down to look and feel like dimes. Another trick learned when I worked at a gas station that had a "business" pay phone: Lift receiver, drop in a nickel, when that nickel has traveled about half way into the coin box, use the receiver to bang the coin return, kind of like a hammer, phone with "ding" twice, we paid a nickel for all local calls. Of course this was 1970s when pay phones were solid metal with "sunflower" dials. You can still see these on old movies and TV shows.

"The only place you'll see darth vader playing the bag pipes while riding a unicycle" Man, they only come out at night. Or in this case, the day.

This was bomb. Would watch a series about old school hacking if you ever made one

3:29 Metal Jesus teaching 8 bit guy how to do the rock on sign is the most wholesome thing I have seen in a while haha

I always wanted to get into phreaking, but the fact my mom worked her entire life at the phone company (throughout all iterations of Nynex, Bell Atlantic, Verizon, etc...) scared me enough to never do anything lol. I did create a redbox and used it a handful of times at the payphone in my high school's cafeteria in a futile attempt to "impress" girls that had no clue what I was doing or even cared I was getting them free phone calls lol.

Who even is weird enough to ask someone to sign a hentai manga

Former telecomm engineer here. The reason for the change had less to do with phreaking and more to do with technology. POTS or "plain old telephone system" uses something called circuit switched data. This means that it literally was connecting different phone lines together, doing translations based on dialed digits to figure out which lines to connect etc. Like those old timey operators plugging cables into a jack. The problem was how do you tell the switching center what 2 lines to connect from the phone? All of the information had to be inline on the same line as the voice call, and so they used tones. This is 'in band signalling' because the controls for the line are on the same line used for talking. Eventually though as things started going digital and later moving from circuit switched networks to packet switched networks (like the internet and tcp/ip) we started using out of band signalling. A digital trunk like like a T1 had 24 time slots, allowing 23 calls (assuming no compression is being used) and 1 control line. So all the signaling was done on a single time slot (the dialed digits etc) and the voice call was on a separate time slot. So it no longer relied upon audio tones on the voice line, because the control was done on a completely different line. Eventually many switching centers went fully packet switched and calls are set up and routed using SS7 over IP like SIP protocol, and switched just like any other network traffic.

Wow, my friends and I did this in 1994. More specifically, my more technically proficient friends (and ones with the first dialup internet) found out how to do this (and other illegal things). They made me “red box” from a “phone “dialer” and other parts ordered from Radio Shack, because I was spending so much money calling my long distance girlfriend. My friends told me to run if I heard strange noises when using it, because the FBI would send the local police due to it being a federal offense to “hack” the phone company. As a poor high school kid, I definitely used it A LOT (until we broke up that is), but every time I used it, I’d look over my shoulders. Never knew how it really worked until now, in 2021, almost 30 years later. 😄 Thank you 🙏

Aaah, the memories. I can't count the number of computers I found with my war dialer, or how many MCI codes I phreaked manually. I would call all over the US, just because I could. I'd call random numbers to Hawaii and other far away places. I remember one time there was a major hurricane slamming into Hawaii, so I called some HI numbers. One of them was a convenience store/market, and I was asking the person what was going on with the weather. They described to me how crazy it was, and it was a thrill for some unknown reason. Phone Man was the program I used to phreak the phone system. I believe it was coded by The Moter City Madman. It wasn't nearly as extensive as Dr. Pepper's prog., but I used my hacked MCI codes to track down MCMM (pretty obvious where he operated out of - Motor City ;-). I finally found him and talked to him on the phone, and he told me how to use all the different color box tones, how the phone system worked, etc. Those were tha days. The good ol' Commodore 64 and Westridge 6420 Automodem - a whole 300 BAUD! Boy, was that FAST at the time! LOL Great memories of a bygone era.

if someone wants to be real meta, bring an iBook to have him sign

"Local long distance" being expensive was a thing most places. Here in Oregon back when I was growing up, the whole state was area code 503. Yet Portland had this strange hodge-podge of local vs. local-long distance vs long-long distance. From within the City of Portland, calling some of the suburbs you had to dial 1-503, while other suburbs you didn't. Anything more than about 30 miles away was always long-long distance, though (so the state capital, Salem.) But _from_ the suburbs to the City proper was *NOT* long distance. So my cousin could call me and it was a local call, but if I called him, it was long distance. And calling him in the suburbs was more expensive than calling my grandmother in Seattle. It was a very strange situation, because some suburbs were "cheap long distance" while others were more expensive. It all depended on how that line was connected to my local exchange. In the case of the one cousin, while he had a 503 area code, and he was *FAR* closer to Portland than to any other major city, it turned out that his trunk line went through Boise, Idaho! That was multiple trunk line connections, so it was expensive. Portland to Salem was slightly cheaper, and Portland to Seattle was cheaper still - because there were more trunk lines connecting Portland to Seattle as the two major cities in this part of the country. My dad worked for "the phone company" through its many iterations over the years - working in only two buildings his entire career, never having to "get re-hired," yet his business cards had five different company names on them over the years - AT&T, Pacific Northwest Bell, US West Communications, Qwest, and finally CenturyLink right before he retired. I learned a lot about POTS through him. One fun side effect is that our house had three telephone lines when I was in high school - connected to three different local exchanges! (different prefixes,) because each time a new line was added, a new local exchange had been built closer than the prior ones, but they never removed the old lines. So when DSL came out, my dad got to try all three phone lines to see which one had the best speed. He even managed to choose his line number (the last four,) so he chose to have it match his address (a house my parents still live in, still with the same phone number.) That confused people quite often. "What's your address?" "4321 Main St." "What's your phone number?" "555-4321" "... Wait, is your address 1234 or is your phone number?" "Yes."

“And this may be the only place you will ever see Darth Vader riding a unicycle and playing the bagpipes” This is comedy gold

The reason you needed to dial a random MCI access code was because MCI would notice if you just tried them sequentially. There was a then famous court case where a guy who got caught doing that.

Hearing the 8 bit guy say "pornographic anime magazine" makes me laugh so hard

4:07 "Pornographic Anime Magazine" David is so pure

In England, our version of the Red Box was called "The Electric Sixpence" because it only generated the tone for that specific coin.

I was on the very tail end of this phenomenon, and only really got a few years of experience before the phone networks were all changed. What really surprised me was to learn that the 8-bit guy literally lived a few miles from me. Hell, I might have even war dialed him a few times.

I still remember the day I independently accidentally discovered dropping a pair of scissors near a telephone’s mouthpiece was just the right frequency to make the phone do peculiar things… 😇

I remember having a keychain device that emulated the dial tone. You would put in the numbers and keep it to the horn and it would dial. It would hold up to 8 phone numbers. So as a kid you would not have to remember the number to call your parents or have a paper with you. Eventually I put in the cheat codes for free calling. Like the pay card numbers and I could use it in the payphone when they started using scratchcards. That was late 80s Early 90s in the Netherlands. Great trip down memory lane. Thank you.

That's an awesome gaming convention. I wish we had one exactly like that one. With all those old school gaming and with those old TV setups. Brings back so many memories. Battles with all my cousins during the summer time . Thanks for the video. I appreciate it.

i love your presentations, they’re extremely informative and interesting to watch, this is the second time im watching this one right after the one on AST. I hope i can see one live one day!

When I was a kid, we figured out the phone number for the modem that controlled the school's HVAC system by just trying a few numbers surrounding the advertised main school number. No automated war dialing was even necessary.

I used to do this in the mid 90s when I needed to make a Payphone call from high school. I used a pocket voice recorder from radio shack to capture the tones for putting 1 dollar into the Payphone. Played it back and BAM! Free phone call. Lol. Miss those days 😢

I had an Novation (? ) AppleCat II modem back then, it was not only able to generate all of these tones - it also was able to detect busy signals, voice, rings, etc. Basically, it was the perfect war-dialer in the late 70s/early 80s. And at a time of 300 baud modems, it could handle a one-way ( single duplex ) transfer at 1200baud. Very, very useful back then ;)

I'd love to go to that convention. I remember having my BBS learning all of this stuff. I was only 11-13 when I was into it but could still get free LD from people w/ call forwarding systems when I was in college. I'm so glad that I found this channel.

There’s a scene in the Chevy Chase film “Funny Farm” where he’s trying call from his home and the operator comes on to tell him to insert 25¢ and he’s trying to tell her it’s not a pay phone. So then he’s dropping quarters into a glass jar to make her think he’s adding money.

In RetroCon: "Everything I'm talking about is obsolete." Well if what you're talking about isn't obsolete, you are probably in the wrong place.

holy moly 4:12 mans on the right has a screen built in to his torso!

I remember back then the guys that had the little black boxes the tone generators. To most of us they were viewed as some type of electronic geniuses.

In -91 when I was at summer camp, one of my american friends (I'm Swedish) used a whistle to make long distance calls. Never knew how it worked or how he figured it out. But I was very impressed atm. :) Thanks David for clearing this up!

when he starts talking about Dallas his Texas accent comes out

This was an awesome age. I was in middle school when I figured this out. By the time I was in high school I bought one of those small pocket recorders from radio shack and recorded all the coin drops and long distance tone. Never paid for a payphone call again. Long distance was a pain for me because I lived right on the county line so a lot of my friends were long distance calls but were within walking distance. Good times.

3:57 the AVGN signature stands out LMAO

I had a friend with me one Halloween night when we were about 14 yrs old and I told him I could call anyone I wanted from the corner of a corn field just down from our houses. He thought I was lying. We went to the corner to a phone pole and I removed the little round cover on the side of the pole. Took my dads antique lineman's phone out, hooked up the 2 clips and said who do we call? He said I don't know so I called the operator and asked to be connected to the L.A.P.D. The lady that answered on the other end was cool about it. I told her I was calling from a corn field in Michigan and wanted to say Happy Halloween to someone on the west coast but I didn't know anyone out there so I called them. I knew she started tracing the call. We stayed on the line until we saw the police coming down the road and took off thru the corn field back to my house. We had a lot of fun back then. We found out later that the neighbor who's line we hooked to couldn't figure out how he got billed for a call to L.A.P.D. LOL

David: I went to Portland Me: *that is the home of the Unipiper* David: Darth vader on a monocycle playing the bagpipe Me: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA YEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Nice video. Brings back some good memories. I did see a copy of that computer program you were demonstrating. However, my only foray into Phreaking was a trick a kid showed me with pay phones. No tech required. You knocked the receiver part of the phone against something hard to loosen the end (I forget now if it was the listening part or the talking part). All we were doing once it was unscrewed was touching the metal receiver cradle (which was metal), with the inner "metal" part of the exposed receiver. That simulated closing the circuit, which was all the quarter did in those older pay phones. Good for local calls (up here in Ontario a quarter got you unlimited talk time as long as it was local).

This makes me so happy. Thanks a ton from someone who has remote nostalgia for a time he wasn't even alive during.

"Here's a few hundred quarters, call someone who cares."

In 1981 I built a "war dialer" which DID listen to the line and COULD detect more than just modem tones. When "War Games" (later) came out , I felt like I'd been outed :-) You can hear my "war dialer" in the first "Early 80s" program on my UKposts channel

Once in college, we made the mistake of giving out one of the MCI codes we phreaked. A few weeks later a local news story reported someone getting hit with a 10 figure long distance bill with all the calls originating from a certain dorm on campus. Luckily not our dorm though! But we were really phreaking out!

I remember when the whole of South Carolina was area code 803, and long distance dialing was required between cities... When I was in college in the early-mid 1990s, the university had their own phone system. You didn't have to dial a prefix to call someone else on campus, so if you wanted to call the dorm front desk, dial 3388. 0 got you an operator, 9 would get an outside line to call off campus. I'm told that some smaller towns used to have this feature, where you could call anyone in the same prefix by dialing just the last four digits. Many pay phones were owned by private companies, and they had their own operators. Since declined collect calls are not charged, you could actually send a short, routine message for free with that operator's help. Call the operator and ask to place a collect call, give a fake name. The name is a code phrase, Butch Workman = "I'm done at work, come get me", George Pullman = "I have a ride home", Bill Corrigan = "Come get me from the airport." When the person you're calling picks up, they decline. You hang up after this. This worked better with automated operators, like MCI or AT&T.

Back in the day when people could go to large events together

Quarter: 5 beeps Dime: 2 beeps Nickel: 1 beep It's just one beep per 5 cents

Nice presentation. I still have my boxes and a original Capt'n crunch whistle that I spied in a box at a garage sale. Oh the days of unblocked scanners and other mods....shout out to 2600 magazine. Peace all.

Texas has 10 different area codes for one metropolitan area while my home of Nebraska has just two for the whole state. 402 for the CST area, 531 for the GMT area.

*70s:* I'll break the law to get a free call. *2k19 has free calls and texts:* doesn't talk to anyone.

There was another reason for "piracy" in the 80ies. Those of us living in less fortunate countries just did not have access to foreign imports (which included software). So even when you made a tremendous effort to obtain a (foreign) personal computer, you had no where to get software from, only friends. There was no internet. Later a few BBS did pop up we could dial and obtain a few things from, but that was already late 80ies. Even books to learn programming were hard to come by, very frustrating. The telephone system in my country did not use in band signaling like the American, heck it didn't even use tones it was still pulse and you could "fool" a certain type of payphone or phone (physical) lock that would be attached to the rotary dial #1 so you would only receive but not make calls. The pulses could be made by quickly hanging/unhanging rapidly the number of times for each number without bothering with the rotary.

My granny had a rotary phone. I discovered I could dial faster by tapping out the numbers on the cradle. Push the peg down just enough and it seems the same click the rotary dial sent. It was like tapping Morse code.

The 8-Bit Guy, we definitely need part number two. Maybe you should even make a playlist on phreaking. That is amazing.

"and i was also asked to sign a porngraphic anime magazine" and it was that day The 8-Bit Guy discovered what hentai was

Anyone from Portland knows that is not the only place you can see a man in a Darth Vader mask riding a unicycle playing the bagpipes

I think this is my favorite video of yours. I have revisited it a couple times not just because of the content, but because it has a wonderful display of community; something I have missed during these trying times.

Man I was chuckling throughout this many times meanwhile that crowd was about as alive as a brick wall. Keep it up I’m 27 and found this very interesting and funny at many times

i had never heard of 'phreaking' before and so I read the title as, "How the telephone freaking WORKED" i was ... a bit confused.

I love how every cosplayer thought you were taking photos.

Loved this presentation. I was born in 1960 so it bought back many good memories of my childhood and teen years.

This was such a great video. It was just a half step before my time so I grew up hearing about phreaking but never really knew the applications beyond phone calls. I guess black cable boxes were the next iterative step in a way

I like how your videos haven’t aged, all of them from the last 4 years could be made on the same day.

I remember learning my home phone number by singing the DTMF tones as I heard them. Didn't know about Asperger and was diagnosed two years ago, at 36.

I had a tone generator program for my C-64 back in the day that did blue box, pink noise, etc. I knew that it was for phone phreaking, but had no idea what to do with any of it. This, all of my software piracy involved meeting up with friends with a shoebox full of floppies and using a bit nibbler. Great times!

Been there. Participated in this. Friends were busted, and I and some others avoided being busted for this. (Long enough ago that the statutes of limitations will almost certainly have kicked in.) Turning yourself into an operator, as recognized by the phone system, was especially neat, as it allowed unlimited long-distance calling. There was some awesome software for generating phone system control tones to do that. But our group frowned upon using it to turn off someone's phone line completely, as some other groups had been doing.

Wow thats amazing, thanks for sharing. Wasn't around in the 70s or 80s so this was very interesting, learned heaps. David you have great knowledge and everything was well explained.

My man signed a doujinshi, I'm done lmao

Shout out to the guy who introduced me to phone phreaking back in '68, Dennie Teresi (now Dennis Terry).

Wonderful presentation. Very captivating. I am surprised at how ignorant I was before viewing this video of how the telephone system worked at that time. Great content.

I'm so glad I ran into you and got a selfie... That makes it three years in a row!!!

This video would’ve been super helpful when I was writing my thesis on the early days of hacking, which required a huge amount of research and exposition on phreaking. Most people “know” about hacking (though a vast majority of those people are the type who think it can be done more quickly when two people team up on one keyboard) but almost no one really remembers phone phreaking. I attribute this to the aging-out of the folks who remember an analog tone-driven phone system from the population and the folks who *do* remember such a thing not knowing about phreaking, forgetting, or dying off. A couple of the people who read the paper recognized things from their youth and remarked that they had been completely unaware of both these techniques and the subculture, but that they had to some extent understood parts of the phone system structure like tone control and party line infrastructure. There’s a great deal to be learned about our technological history which connects back to phreaking - like how the Yippie movement was directly connected to it. They were formed as the Youth International Party Line, or YIPL, which is (arguably) why they became known as the Yippies - there’s dispute as to where the name comes from. Most sources agree however that the “party line” portion was a double-entendre (I think that’s the right word) which was referencing the party lines that phreaks used to hang out in. Their newsletter (titled “The Youth International Party Line, later changed to the Technology Assistance Program or TAP) focused HEAVILY on distributing phreaking methods as broadly as possible, partially because the folks involved were dedicated phreaks, but also because those less interested in phreaking WERE interested in screwing over the phone company and the US government, which worked together to collect a tax on phone calls which was seen as supporting the Vietnam War. This was just one in a long list of pretty valid complaints including a collaboration between the Bell System and the government to record millions of calls basically automatically when it was suspected a Box was being used, which prior to the PATRIOT Act was the largest domestic spying operation ever carried out in the US. Even most people who truly *know* hacking aren’t aware that some of the earliest hacktivism was part of the protest against the war in Vietnam which involved distributing information about how to make free calls to normies, much less the other intensely fascinating history of phreaking. Thank you for helping. Someday I’d like to do the kinds of things you do. I need to learn to be a better researcher first, though. I’m sure that I got a few things totally wrong in my paper, and probably even in this comment. It was a history degree, and I’m pretty sure everyone who read it was just like “ok, the source seems to be saying this, so even if I have zero idea what he’s talking about I just gotta go with it.” I hope as more people my age and younger become historians, the profession will become much more technologically aware - but we are losing so much history very day because it isn’t recorded anywhere, and by the time History as a profession starts to document early and immediately pre-computer-age history and the way it shaped our modern world, we will have forgotten a great deal of it. My paper was an attempt to fight back against that, in some small way. It did not do much, and it is likely that no one will ever read it again and that most who did read it have forgotten almost everything in it, but it’s something I’m proud of and I don’t have much of that in my life.

Ohhhhhh man, this takes me back. I'm subscribing and hoping there's video's on BBS' too!

There were other hacks as well - if you could take over a voicemail box you could record a message like "Yes operator I'll accept the charges" - and then call the operator for a long-distance call that was charged to another number - which was the voicemail box that would happily announce it would accept the charges.

You should have mentioned the blind phone phreaks back in the day who could simply whistle tones into the phone.

You make a great point that I've trying people to get for years now: a pirated game isn't an unfulfilled sale.

Your channel is awesome. I enjoy this and techmoan alot. Thanks alot 😎

I wasn't old enough to be into phone phreaking but I knew of it and was always curious how and why it worked. Great explanation. Now... if I ever time travel, I'm all set for phone calls for a few decades.