I studied electronics and GSM was a big part of the telecommunications subject. I visited the HQ of a mobile provider, was shown around and met the cartel boss (in hindsight, I wonder how much a Luigi moment would have affected the triopoly). I also visited a museum of technology and used an early touch-click model (pre-DTMF so not touch-tone, and no buffer so you had to wait for the simulated dial to stop clicking).
But still, I don’t know the basics of wired phones cuz I’ve never relly used them. How does voice travel both ways on a single twisted pair? How can Inspector Clouseau the telephone engineer in The Pink Panther (1978) hear a conversation from other phones in the house? How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit? Can I use voice services on rotary phones, and what if I need to press * or #? All these would be obvious to 1980s kids…
How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit?
This is the fun part: they don’t! The exchange just listens for enough tones to make up an instruction then performs what it was instructed to do. That’s why when you call places it’ll say “press 1 to speak with so-and-so” is you’ve now been connection to another exchange which is waiting for instructions on the form of dial tones generated by button presses.
Phreakers figured out ways to generate the tones needed to all sorts of fun things like play the “payment received” tone into a payphone, or to tell the exchange to connect to another exchange that it might not otherwise (and sometimes would chain them together and see how many hops they could achieve before the sheer distance of the call completely destroyed the call) and all sorts of other fun
Yes, I know about phreakers but what I mean is, phone numbers differ by length. Did the exchange wait until no more tones/clicks in a while or is there a variable length acheved by, say, making all area codes start with 0?
I studied electronics and GSM was a big part of the telecommunications subject. I visited the HQ of a mobile provider, was shown around and met the cartel boss (in hindsight, I wonder how much a Luigi moment would have affected the triopoly). I also visited a museum of technology and used an early touch-click model (pre-DTMF so not touch-tone, and no buffer so you had to wait for the simulated dial to stop clicking).
But still, I don’t know the basics of wired phones cuz I’ve never relly used them. How does voice travel both ways on a single twisted pair? How can Inspector Clouseau the telephone engineer in The Pink Panther (1978) hear a conversation from other phones in the house? How does the exchange know I’ve dialed the last digit? Can I use voice services on rotary phones, and what if I need to press * or #? All these would be obvious to 1980s kids…
This is the fun part: they don’t! The exchange just listens for enough tones to make up an instruction then performs what it was instructed to do. That’s why when you call places it’ll say “press 1 to speak with so-and-so” is you’ve now been connection to another exchange which is waiting for instructions on the form of dial tones generated by button presses.
Phreakers figured out ways to generate the tones needed to all sorts of fun things like play the “payment received” tone into a payphone, or to tell the exchange to connect to another exchange that it might not otherwise (and sometimes would chain them together and see how many hops they could achieve before the sheer distance of the call completely destroyed the call) and all sorts of other fun
Yes, I know about phreakers but what I mean is, phone numbers differ by length. Did the exchange wait until no more tones/clicks in a while or is there a variable length acheved by, say, making all area codes start with 0?