This was important, maybe more important than we might remember. Thanks to the Internet and the Web and Google, everything and everyone seems to be just a few mouse clicks away. Interested in something obscure, for instance, using hypodermic needles to water your Venus flytrap? Want to collect air raid sirens? Care to meet men and women who wear furry animal costumes and chase one another around hotel lobbies at science fiction conventions? Give ’em a Google, though perhaps you shouldn’t Google that last one from your place of work. In every case you’ll find there are websites and groups devoted to the topic. The Internet seems to be telling us: You Are Not Alone—no matter who you are or how rare your interests.
But in 1969, until he discovered loop arounds and talkable busy signals, Acker felt like he was Very Much Alone. Sure, he had friends at school who helped him out with his telephone hobby, but none of them were into the nitty-gritty like he was. “They were all happy to make free phone calls,” Acker recalls. “I don’t say that disparagingly. They just weren’t into the guts of it.” It wasn’t just his schoolmates who liked free calls, by the way. For a time Acker’s house mother at school was a woman from South America and “every night for about four or five months she got to call home,” Acker says, the joy audible in his voice.
“My brother was totally into different things,” Acker says. “I couldn’t tell him what I discovered, he wouldn’t have gotten it.” In fact, “He was older than I was, so the less he knew about the legally edgy aspects of it, the better.”
Until he learned about the other phreaks, Acker recalls, as far as he was concerned, “I was pretty much the only one, and I was pretty much operating in isolation.”
Loop arounds and talkable busy signals were unintentional— happy accidents that made for oases in the network. But other telephonic watering holes were planned.
Imagine for a second that you’re a hardworking, businesslike caveman and you’ve just invented the pencil. Your cavemate asks you, What’s it good for? You straighten up slightly, adjust the collar of your starched saber-toothed-tiger-skin shirt, and say, “Well, my goodness, this invention will propel us into the zeroth century! It will allow sharp-eyed cave dwellers—we’ll call them accountants—to keep track of how many rocks and sticks we owe each other. With it, we will be able to record instructions for future generations regarding optimal hunting and gathering strategies. It will revolutionize the business of being a cave person!”
Your cavemate raises a skeptical eyebrow. And then picks up your pencil and begins sketching a beautiful drawing on the cave wall. You look on, dumbfounded, as you realize that the highest technology in the world at that moment—the pencil—has just been used to make art.
A telephonic version of this scene played out in Los Angeles in the 1960s. It went by funny names: “The Machine.” “VERMONT.” “Z, ZZ, ZZZ.” “Superphone.” All were telephone numbers you could call to hear tape-recorded audio performances. Most were comedy skits, some were horoscope readings, others were political commentary and humor. They were known as “joke lines” or “dial-a-joke” numbers. Most were run by high school or college kids. Once again, someone had taken the day’s high technology—the telephone—and used it to make art.
In today’s world it is tempting to dismiss telephone joke lines as quaint, even laughable. But think about it for a second. How many of the sites you visit during a day’s surfing online are the figurative descendants of these telephone joke lines? The funny website or YouTube link that your friend emailed you today may have video or animation, it may be a lot flashier, it’s probably more professionally produced, but basically it’s the same idea as a telephone joke line: people sat down, came up with something they thought was funny, recorded it in some way, and put it out there for you to enjoy. Today you point and click, yesterday you dialed. Same deal. The impulse is as old as cave drawings.
Practically, though, there’s a big difference between 1969 and now. Today you can go to Facebook or TypePad or Twitter and have a presence on the Web in five minutes. Video cameras are cheap and YouTube is free. But setting up a joke line in 1969 was another matter entirely. Until just one year earlier you weren’t allowed to connect any non–Bell System electrical equipment to your telephone line—by any means. Ma Bell insisted that this had nothing to do with maintaining AT&T’s telephone monopoly. Rather, she said, it was to maintain the integrity of the nation’s telephone network, which AT&T built and that only AT&T understood. As the president of AT&T said in 1973, “The national switched telephone network is an interdependent, sensitive, highly sophisticated system. To work well, the system depends on technically compatible components. The phone network is not made of cans and string. It consists of intricate electrical switches and terminals, precisely configured, rigorously tested, and built to exact specifications. If consumers can plug anything they want into the network—any old piece of junk made who knows where—the system will break down. A faulty telephone in one house could conceivably disrupt service to an entire city. A system such as the switched telephone network is only as good as its weakest component.”
This logic extended not just to telephone lines but to telephones themselves. Consider the case of the Hush-A-Phone. This was a product first manufactured in the 1920s by, you guessed it, the Hush-A-Phone Corporation. It was not a sophisticated electrical circuit that connected up to Ma Bell’s fragile network. No, it was a molded rubber cup that fit over the telephone mouthpiece. It allowed you to whisper into your phone and thus gain a little bit of privacy from your house or office mates; you can think of it as the rubber widget equivalent of cupping your hand between your mouth and the telephone to keep others from hearing you.
AT&T didn’t like it; tariffs were passed that made it a violation to use a telephone with “any device not furnished by the phone company.” AT&T threatened to disconnect the telephone service of both vendors and users of the Hush-A-Phone for violating these rules. Hush-A-Phone Corporation complained to the Federal Communications Commission in 1948. In 1951 the FCC decided in favor of the telephone company. Hush-A-Phone objected; briefs were filed. The FCC took the matter “under advisement” for four more years. In late 1955 the communications commission officially sided with AT&T, saying that this sinister rubber widget was “deleterious to the telephone system and injures the service rendered by it” because its use sometimes “results in a loss of voice intelligibility, and also has an adverse affect on voice recognition and naturalness.” Hush-A-Phone filed suit in federal court—and won. The D.C. court of appeals decided in 1956 that the tariff-imposed ban was “unwarranted interference with the telephone subscriber’s right reasonably to use his telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental.”
Eight years, a protracted FCC hearing, and a lawsuit to get the right to use a rubber cup on a telephone mouthpiece.
The beautiful thing about teenagers is that they rarely pay attention to this kind of stuff. And thus was born the Machine, one of the earliest telephone joke lines. It was the brainchild of two Toms in San Pedro, California: Tom Plimmer and Tom Politeo; born exactly one week apart, they were known as Tom 0 and Tom 1 by their friends. While the Machine may have been their creation, it looked more like something that Rube Goldberg would have designed. It consisted of an open-reel tape recorder and some custom electronics to turn it into an answering machine, with four thirty-second skits that callers could hear. Each caller would get the next skit in sequence until it repeated. Because it had to repeat, the two Toms couldn’t use a standard cassette system. Reel-to-real audiotape ran at seven inches per second, so two minutes of audio translated into seventy feet of audiotape. This audiotape was festooned around Politeo’s bedroom, fed through dozens of circular metal binder clips. When the Machine was playing an announcement, it was as if Politeo’s bedroom had come alive, a whirling, reeling mass of moving audiotape.
The Machine launched on Tom 1’s seventeenth birthda
y in September 1969. “Eight three three triple three nine” was the number. “A large part of what we were trying to do was to breathe more life into the phone system,” says Politeo. The two Toms succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Before long the Machine was receiving two thousand calls per day, an average of one call every forty-five seconds. A supervisor who worked in their local telephone company central office described to them the havoc the Machine’s popularity was causing with the office’s step-by-step switching equipment. Your local connector group has eight switches, he explained. Of these, one of them seems like it’s permanently connected to your line. The other seven, he said, are permanently trying to connect to your line.
Of course, you don’t build something like the Machine without knowing a little bit about the telephone system itself. Rick Plath, one of Acker’s friends in LA, knew the two Toms through the Machine. Sensing kindred spirits, Plath told Plimmer he should call Bill in New York.
A few days later Acker’s telephone rang. When he picked it up he heard a familiar sound: a long-distance call with unnatural routing. “Hi, this is Tom in San Pedro,” the caller said. “Vancouverish,” he added. Vancouverish? Between that odd word and the distinctive sound of the long-distance trunk, Acker knew instantly what was going on: Tom was calling him from San Pedro via Vancouver, just like Acker had learned to do himself from Farmingdale by routing his long-distance calls through Halifax.
“Tom Plimmer was one of my first constant connections,” Acker recalls. “We would talk for hours.”
The network continued to grow. Before long Acker and the other phreaks were regularly talking to some twenty or so people. Some were in Long Island, New York, like Acker, but more were in California. “California was the epicenter,” Acker says. It was, he felt, the “capital of phreakdom.” Acker’s lack of a Long Island accent is testimony to California’s influence. “It was at that time in my life where I decided I’d rather sound like the California phone phreaks,” he says. “I needed to ditch my New York accent.”
It was late January 1970 before they called the Old Man. They had all heard of Joe Engressia, of course, the blind whistling phone phreak mentioned in the newspapers a year earlier. But nobody had actually talked to him. Finally Bob Sirmons, a phone phreak in Los Angeles, took it upon himself to track down Engressia. It wasn’t hard. Sirmons called Acker after reaching Engressia at his dorm in Tampa: I found him! He wants to talk to us! Here’s his number!
Acker dialed Engressia’s number. Acker’s ears were well trained and he could tell one bit of telephone company switching equipment from another just by sound. As he listened to the clicks and clunks the network made during the ten or so seconds it spent getting his call from Long Island to Tampa, he heard something unusual. Acker knew that Engressia lived in an area whose phone service was provided by General Telephone, an independent telephone company. But the sound the network made right before Engressia’s phone started to ring was that of a #5 crossbar telephone switch, a piece of Bell System equipment. In other words, it was a piece of equipment that had no business being down in General Telephone territory.
Engressia answered the phone. “Hey, where did General Telephone get a number five crossbar?” Acker asked him. Not just anyone would know that such a thing was unusual; indeed, most wouldn’t have the ears to have noticed it at all. With a telephonic smile, Engressia explained that the #5 crossbar had come from Northern Electric—it was equipment from the Bell System out of snowy Canada, now enjoying its quasi-retirement in sunny Florida.
“It was clear we kind of liked the same things,” Acker recalls. It was an understatement. That phone call was the first of thousands of hours he and Engressia would spend together on the telephone.
Many of these hours, at least in 1970, would be spent on a conference call that the phreaks called “2111.” When they reached the 2111 conference they’d hear a distinctive, high-pitched hum. It wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t talk over it, but it was loud enough that you couldn’t miss it. When they heard that hum, they knew just where they were in the network. As Bill Acker described it later, “The hum told us that we were home.”
The hum came from an obscure little circuit called a TWX converter that lived deep in the bowels of a step-tandem switching machine in British Columbia. TWX stood for “teletypewriter exchange”; in the days before faxes and email, teletype machines were used by big companies and organizations to quickly communicate via the printed word over long distances. Clunky and electromechanical, teletypes sent data over the telephone line at then blazing speeds—typically forty-five words per minute—clacking away, each letter mechanically printed one at a time in ink on paper. In essence, they were big, remotely controlled electric typewriters, built by the Teletype Corporation, part of the AT&T empire.
The TWX converter was normally used for allowing different types of teletype machines to talk to one another. But somebody had left it slightly misconfigured, or maybe it had fallen into disrepair. Either way, it’s kind of like that little door to the crawl space under your house: forget to button it up tight and you’ll wind up with rodents living in your basement. Leave your TWX converter misconfigured and it’ll get infested with phone phreaks.
The rodents like your basement because it’s warm and dry. The phone phreaks liked the TWX converter because its misconfiguration turned it into a giant conference call, something rarer than diamonds in 1970. Its discovery was a mix of intention and accident, a happy offshoot from the phone phreaks’ attempts to plumb the mysteries of the Vancouver step tandem by exhaustively dialing codes within it. One of the codes they discovered was 21: you’d call a number in the 604 area code, whistle off with 2,600 Hz, and then whistle 21 followed by any two digits; 2111 was popular because it was easy to whistle: bleep bleep . . . bleep . . . bleep . . . bleep and you’re done. You’d be rewarded with an unusual dial tone, a constant tone that sounded like a continuous fourth octave B musical note. From this you could keep whistling digits to place a free call to anywhere you wanted.
The network of phreaks—Acker, Engressia, Draper, Teresi, Bernay, Fettgather, and the rest—had been using 2111 to make free phone calls via the Vancouver step tandem since the start of 1970. But something changed sometime around May of that year. The fourth octave B dial tone went away, leaving only the high-pitched hum. No more dial tone meant no more free calls. The phone phreaks were sad.
Then someone noticed something odd. If multiple people called 2111 at the same time they all got connected, forming one big conference call. In today’s world of three-way calling and business and personal conference dial-in numbers, it’s hard to remember just what an unusual animal an actual conference call circuit was back in 1970. Back then, about the only people who could afford conference calls were big businesses and the government. If you were a businessperson who wanted to have a conference call, you rang up a special operator and had her manually connect you to all the people you wanted on your call. You then paid AT&T’s highest rate for each person you were calling, the so-called operator assisted rate, per person, per minute. If you were a phone phreak, you had loops and talkable busy signals and broken recordings, but loops supported only two people at once, and the others were annoying to use, what with busy signals and recordings interrupting your chatter.
In contrast, 2111 easily supported a dozen or more people; in fact, there seemed to be no limit to the number of people who could be conferenced together on it. Plus, 2111 had a built-in riffraff catcher, something to keep out the 1970s version of what hackers today would call script kiddies, that is, people who weren’t serious about the hobby. This was because you couldn’t merely call in to 2111 via a simple telephone call. You needed a whistle or an electronic tone generator to send the pulses of 2,600 Hz that the Vancouver step tandem wanted to hear before it would connect you to the conference.
By the late summer of 1970 the 2111 conference had become the electronic meeting pl
ace for a burgeoning collection of phone phreaks, their virtual home in one of the first virtual places—the long-distance telephone network. Together the 2111 gang formed an unlikely group, made all the more unlikely by a couple of things. The first was that these weren’t the only phone phreaks, just the hard-core nucleus of a larger, wider, more casual network, one that stretched across the country. Who would ever have thought that in 1970 the obscure technical hobby of hacking telephones—an illegal one with no publicity to speak of—could possibly bring together dozens of like-minded young people throughout the United States?
The second thing was that more than half of the core group—Engressia, Acker, Teresi, and Fettgather—were blind. Theories abounded as to why this was so. To be sure, blind people spent a lot of time on the telephone, perhaps more than sighted people. Since there were relatively fewer blind people in the United States, their friendships tended to be more spread out. Thus suffering from higher-than-average phone bills, perhaps they were keener than most for ways to save money on telephone calls. Then too there was the “blind people have better hearing to compensate for their blindness” theory that suggested the sightless kids were better able to appreciate the subtle variations in tone, noise, and timbre of the long-distance telephone network, although there would turn out to be several sighted people with an equally acute appreciation of the sonic qualities of the telephone network. Finally, the telephone probably served as a great equalizer. On the telephone, after all, everyone is blind.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 18