25The first automatic telephone exchange: Roger B. Hill, “The Early Years of the Strowger System,” Bell Laboratories Record, vol. 31, no. 3, March 1953, pp. 95ff, at http://www.telecomwriting.com/Switching/EarlyYears.html
26Bell had licensed: Fagen, Bell System, p. 554.
26reached its peak: The percentage of lines connected to step-by-step switches peaked in 1960 at 49 percent. See ibid., p. 612.
26more than six thousand: AT&T, “Milestones in AT&T History,” at http://www.corp.att.com/history/milestones.html.
26Prices varied: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, pp. 465–80.
26different phone lines installed: Brooks, Telephone, p. 109.
27Bell had about fifteen hundred: Ibid., p. 111.
27“ruthless, grinding, oppressive monopoly”: Ibid., pp. 112–14.
27Interstate Commerce Commission: Letter from Attorney General to Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, January 7, 1913, quoted in Annual Report of the Directors of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1913, p. 29.
27just like the postal system: Brooks, Telephone, p. 148.
27Kingsbury Commitment: AT&T, Annual Report of the Directors of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1914, pp. 24–27; Brooks, Telephone, p. 136.
28“The trick of the Kingsbury Commitment”:Wu, Master Switch, p. 56.
2850 million telephone calls: AT&T, Report of the Directors to the Stockholders for the Year 1925.
Chapter 3: Cat and Canary
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted with David Condon.
31“verbally informed the operator of his wishes”: Fagen, Bell System, p. 502.
32“it is unbelievable that it took so long to invent”: Ibid., p. 578.
32two-letter, five-digit: I have simplified a bit of the numbering history here. Telephone numbering schemes varied from place to place. Some towns had four-digit telephone numbers, others fewer digits. When mixed letter-number dialing arrived in 1922, it started out as three letters and four digits; it changed to two letters and five digits in 1947. See Amos E. Joel Jr., A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System: Switching Technology (1925–1975) (New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1982), pp. 12, 608. An informative website that provides history on telephone exchange names is the Telephone EXchange Name Project, at http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html.
32had to dial 211: The long-distance access code varied from place to place, but 211 was common in cities with panel or crossbar telephone systems. In places with step-by-step switching equipment, 112 was used; the telephone company offered a phrase to help customers remember this: “dial one-one-two to go straight through.” See Joel, Switching Technology, p. 123.
34costs $5.90: Federal Communications Commission, The Industry Analysis Division’s Reference Book of Rates, Price Indices, and Expenditures for Telephone Service, July 1998, p. 47 (“AT&T Basic Schedule Residential Rates for 10-Minute Interstate Inter-LATA Calls,” Table 2.5), at http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/ref98.pdf.
34double or nothing scheme: Fagen, Bell System, pp. 618–19, 629.
35Josefina Q. Zoetrope: Variations of this scheme (e.g., with collect calls instead of person-to-person calls) were possible as well.
36phone phreak nickname: Condon had another nickname, bestowed on him by the younger phone phreak Joe Engressia: Manuel Daze, a pun on “manual days” since, unlike the other phone phreaks in the 1960s, Condon had been playing games with the telephone system since the manual days of operators and switchboards.
39highest classification: Even “unclassified” AT&T documents were often stamped “Not for use or disclosure outside the Bell System except under written agreement.”
39Oak Ridge: George O. Robinson Jr., The Oak Ridge Story (Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, Inc., 1950).
Chapter 4: The Largest Machine in the World
41“could not have supported such a work force”: Fagen, Bell System, p. 613.
42some 15 percent of telephones: Robert G. Elliott, “Dial Service Is Extending Its Reach,” Bell Telephone Magazine, Summer 1955, p. 110.
4270 percent of long-distance telephone calls: AT&T Long Lines Department, Our Company and How It Operates, 1960, p. 6.
42“stone knives and bearskins”: Star Trek, original series episode 28, “City on the Edge of Forever,” April 6, 1967. (Thanks, Mr. Spock.)
43national numbing plan: AT&T’s first national numbering plan divided the country into eighty-six different geographic areas called numbering plan areas (NPAs). Each numbering plan area was assigned a three-digit “numbering plan area code,” which is where the more familiar term “area code” comes from. Within the telephone company and, later, within the phone phreak community, area codes were generally referred to as NPAs. See F. F. Shipley, “Nation-Wide Dialing,” Bell Laboratories Record, vol. 23, October 1945, p. 368; W. H. Nunn, “Nationwide Numbering Plan,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 31, September 1952, p. 851; and Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 123–28.
44machines need to be able to do the billing: For more on the incredible “automatic message accounting” (AMA) system see http://explodingthephone.com/extra/ama.
44largest machine in the world: I am indebted to the late Robert Hill for the lovely description of the telephone network as the “largest machine in the world, extending as it does over the whole surface of the earth.” See Robert Hill, “Days at the Old Bailey,” Interface (the house journal of Cambridge Consultants Ltd.), vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974, p. 10
46memory called a sender: L. T. Anderson, “Senders for #5 Crossbar,” Bell Laboratories Record, November 1949, p. 385. To be fair, it was possible to augment step-by-step switches with memory and brains as well, and this idea found popularity in the United Kingdom in the 1920s with what were called “directorized” step-by-step switches. See the BT Archives at http://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/1912to1968/1922.htm.
46“In a word, the switching systems”: Joel, Switching Technology, p. 3. The boys at Bell Labs were justifiably proud of their intelligent machines and suggested they might be compared to a form of human intelligence. See John Meszar, “Switching Systems as Mechanical Brains,” Bell Laboratories Record, February 1953, p. 63
464A deserved a grander name: The #4A crossbar switch was an advanced version of the original #4 crossbar. The first #4 crossbar was installed in Philadelphia in 1943 and was followed by sister installations in Boston, New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and Oakland; all of these systems would eventually be upgraded to be more or less the same as a #4A crossbar. The first #4A crossbar was installed in Albany, New York, in 1950. See Joel, Switching Technology, p. 180.
46fifty-nine of them: Our Company and How It Operates, p. 6.
47thin steel cards: Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 180–83.
47“At the end of this era”: Ibid., p. 3.
47less intelligent brethren: By the 1950s the telephone network consisted of about twenty-six hundred long-distance switching centers divided into five different levels of hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy were the “regional” or class 1 centers—nine in the United States and two in Canada—followed by the “sectional” (class 2) centers, the “primary” (class 3) centers, the “toll” (class 4) centers, and then “toll points” (class 5). At the very bottom of the hierarchy were “end offices”—telephone switching offices that served only subscribers and weren’t used for switching long-distance traffic. Lower-level switching machines were said to “home” on higher-level machines, that is, if they didn’t have direct trunk lines to some place, they would forward the call to the machine they homed on in the hopes that it did. So, for example, a primary center such as Casper, Wyoming, might hom
e on a sectional center like Cheyenne, and Cheyenne would in turn home on the regional center in Denver, Colorado. Naturally, the brainy 4As would go at the top of the network and less intelligent switching machines, such as crossbar tandems and step tandems, would make up the lower rungs. The telephone company toyed for a time with the notion of a “national center” in St. Louis, Missouri, but this idea never came to fruition. For the evolution of the hierarchical network concept, see H. S. Osborne, “General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 9, no. 3, July 1930, p. 429; AT&T, Notes on Nationwide Dialing, 1955
47supervisory information: Fagen, Bell System, p. 505.
47multifrequency language, or MF: The earliest published article on MF signaling seems to be D. L. Moody, “Multifrequency Pulsing,” Bell Laboratories Record, vol. 23, December 1945, p. 466
48used this 2,600 Hz tone: Not all long-distance trunk (“carrier”) systems used 2,600 Hz for signaling, but the majority did. See Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 128–30. For SF signaling history, see A. Weaver and N. A. Newell, “In-Band Single-Frequency Signaling,” Bell System Technical Journal, November 1954, pp. 1309–30
48“playing a tune for a telephone number”: “Playing a tune for a telephone number” (advertisement), Popular Science Monthly, February 1950, p. 5
48educational AT&T movie: AT&T, Speeding Speech, 1950s, at http://www.archive.org/details/Speeding1950.
48“sing” to each other: “‘Long Distance Brain,’ Now in Operation Here, Hears, Reads, and Sings,” Times-News (Hendersonville, NC), November 22, 1954, p. 1.
48in-band signaling: Out-of-band signaling was also used on some long-distance trunks transmitted by the N1, O1, and ON carrier systems. See Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 129–30.
49operator distance dialing: Ibid., pp. 52–54. Also known as “operator toll dialing,” operator dialing of long-distance calls started on a very limited basis as early as the 1920s but suffered from various technical problems in its early days.
49“guinea pigs”: “Direct Long Distance Dialing Told Realtors,” Lodi News-Sentinel (Lodi, CA), May 25, 1955, p. 1.
49Englewood, New Jersey: “Englewood Begins Long Distance Customer Dialing,” Bell Laboratories Record, December 1951, p. 571
50318-GA2-2134: Ibid. Yes, in the original numbering plan, San Francisco was 318, not 415.
Chapter 5: Blue Box
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted with Ralph Barclay as well as FBI files.
51“Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching”: Breen and Dahlbom, “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.” There is an oft-repeated legend in the phone phreak community that Bell security agents visited university engineering libraries across the country in the late 1960s or early 1970s and either demanded that issue be withdrawn from circulation or, in some versions of the story, used razor blades to slice this article out of the Bell System Technical Journal. Ken Hopper of Bell Laboratories denies that this is true, and the existence of the article intact at the Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT engineering libraries suggests that he is right.
53dial directory assistance: Actually, you wouldn’t have called it “directory assistance” in 1960. Back then it was known simply as “information.” The change to directory assistance came in 1968: “Frankly, the term ‘information’ has caused a lot of confusion and delay,” said a telephone company manager. “Many people call for bus schedules, solutions to homework problems, baseball scores and other information which our operators do not have . . . we feel the new name is more descriptive and should eliminate a lot of customer misunderstanding.” See, e.g., “‘Directory Assistance’ Replacing ‘Information’ on Telephone Calls,” Observer-Reporter (Washington, PA), August 24, 1968, p. 6A. By the way, 555-1212 for information wasn’t introduced until 1959. See “For Phone Information, Dial 112 212 555 1212,” New York Times, August 7, 1959, p. 25
56bobby pin into an electrical outlet: Anita Harris (Ralph Barclay’s sister), author interview, 2012.
57Touch-tone phones: AT&T rolled out touch-tone telephone service to the general public in late 1963, although trials of different versions of pushbutton dialing date as far back as 1948. See Joel Jr., Switching Technology, pp. 336–42. Interestingly, one of the early prototypes of touch-tone service used the same tones as those in the multifrequency signaling system—and, thus, that blue boxes used. Imagine how much worse AT&T’s fraud problems would have been had it inadvertently installed a blue box in every household!
57blue box: Memorandum from J. F. Doherty, AT&T director of security, to H. W. Caming, AT&T attorney, February 13, 1975
59set up in his garage: Barclay remembers, “When that came out later, there were some people who weren’t too happy about it.”
61pleaded guilty: FBI file 165-HQ-25, September 1961
Chapter 6: “Some People Collect Stamps”
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted with Charlie Pyne, Tony Lauck, and Ed Ross, as well as FBI files.
66special telephone operators: For a list of 0xx and 1xx operator codes, see http://explodingthephone.com/extra/0xx1xx.
67particularly proud of one call: Tape recording provided by Charlie Pyne, undated but likely 1959 or 1960
68It also functioned: Sam Smith, “Magna Cum Probation: Falling from Grace at Harvard U,” from Multitudes: The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam Smith, 1999, at http://prorev.com/mmintro.htm. “The Network” was shorthand for the station’s original call letters, WHCN: the Harvard/Crimson Network.
69connect their telephone switches: A privately run telephone system, such as for a university or a big company, was called a “private branch exchange,” or PBX. Like early telephone exchanges, these started out as purely manual affairs, with an operator sticking plugs into jacks at a switchboard. As automated switching developed, it became more common for institutions to have their own automatic switching systems; such an exchange was properly called a “private automatic branch exchange” or PABX.
70tie up all the lines: “Telephone Hackers Active,” The Tech (MIT student newspaper), November 20, 1963
by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dialtone, indicating an outside line, was found.” This article is often cited as the first published use of the word hacker in its modern meaning.
71Fine Arts 13 notebook: Charlie Pyne, “Fine Arts 13,” 1963
72Notes on Distance Dialing: Notes on Distance Dialing became a staple phone phreak technical reference. AT&T published versions of it in 1956
76sound of the telephone line: Telephone lines behaved slightly differently—and sounded slightly different—once billing had started. In particular, momentarily depressing the hook switch had a very different sound once billing had started.
76black box: See chapter 8 for details.
77Ernie Reid: Pyne, Lauck, and Ross met Reid through a blind student at Harvard named Robert Holdt.
77Heckel also had a nine a.m. appointment: Pyne recalls Heckel having an appointment with his dean at MIT, but FBI records do not confirm this.
80According to an FBI memo: FBI file 65-HQ-68169, serial 2, April 24, 1963, p. 3
80As the FBI memo put it: Ibid.
80spy ring: “FBI Smashes Spy Ring,” Boston Globe, July 3, 1963, p. 1; Seth S. King, “Britain Convicts All Five in Spy Trial,” New York Times, March 23, 1961, p. 1.
81all attended one of their country’s top universities: “New Reports on Philby Spy Case of ’63 Vex Britain,” New York Times, October 8, 1967.
81prosecuted for making free phone calls: FBI file 65-HQ-68169, serial 3, May 1, 1963
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 38