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This is such a great site. Any of Evan Doorbell's "How I Became a Phone Phreak" or "Sounds of Long Distance" are especially great.

Rachael Morrison and her team poured their heart into this and it shows... it is just so good. (Disclaimer: I was interviewed for the movie and narrate parts of it.) See it if you can.

Rachael Morrison, the director, was kind enough to invite me to the premier at Sundance, since she interviewed me for the film. She and her crew did an amazing job. She found so much archival material and she and her team stitched it together to tell a moving and historically accurate story. People were in tears after the premier. Just so good.


Hey Fogus! A few links or resources you might enjoy:

* Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing, 1945: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nootd1945.pdf

* General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service, 1930: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/gspts1930.pdf

* (Book) Engineering and Operations in the Bell System, 1984: https://bitsavers.org/communications/westernElectric/books/E...

* (Shameless plug) My book on the history of phone phreaking, Exploding the Phone, which has a lot of stuff on Engressia in it: https://explodingthephone.com/

Also, there is a documentary film coming up at Sundance about Engressia! https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fad21a5535277... Very excited to see it!


Evan's stuff is excellent and worth watching/listening to.

Shameless plug: if you like his stuff, you might also like my book, "Exploding The Phone", which is a history of phone phreaking. https://explodingthephone.com/

Evan narrated the Audible version. :-)


I enjoyed your book, made sense of a lot of things 13 year old me had stumbled upon that I could never get to work (as I was maybe 5 years too late).


That's awesome, thank you!


I very much recommend this book as well. Great read. Thanks for writing it!


Exploding The Phone was an excellent read.


Thanks for the mention and honored to be in the same mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!


Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5

SS5 was derived from AT&T's US MF signaling system, described in "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching" by Breen and Dahlbom, Bell System Technical Journal, November 1960. PDF here: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf

The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.


CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...


Fascinating article. See also

https://web.archive.org/web/20120314023131if_/http://www.alc...

for an early technical article describing the implementation details of the familiar DTMF "touch tone" dialing system, noting that the precise details differ from the final implementation — in particular, the high group frequencies increased from 1,094/1,209/1,336/1,477 Hz to 1,209/1,336/1,477/1,633 Hz, possibly to mitigate the "pulling" effect described on pp. 251–252 (though I can find no reference for the rationale).


Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. <shameless plug> If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com </shameless plug>


Oh yeah. Something I was so interested in, I wrote a history book about it: https://explodingthephone.com/

If you like old documents, check out, e.g., https://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=captain+crunch&so...

Someone mentioned phrack above. There was (still is!) also 2600, and before that, YIPL/TAP, the original phone phreak newsletter: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91

If you get up Seattle way ever, be sure to check out the Connections Museum, where you can see not just old telephones, but old telephone switching equipment, lovingly maintained by some amazing people: https://www.telcomhistory.org/connections-museum-seattle/ They have an amazing youtube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/c/connectionsmuseum


If you want something really ancient, check out YIPL/TAP, which was the first phone phreak newsletter (started publishing in May 1971) that was the granddaddy of 2600. You can get it on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/YIPLTAP_1-91


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