Broward Community College - Silver Sands Yearbook (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

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Cl' i University of South Florida rgraduate students Mike Goodwin Ken Cramer walked into the it phone booth just outside their iitory they had only a dime. , majoring in journalism, slid the ' piece of currency through the ded slot, got a dial tone, and i the toll free 800 number of a r insurance company in New like was patiently dialing off the ssary digits, Ken pulled a small Ilic box, no larger than an eight istor portable AM radio out of knapsack he carries with him tantly. compact piece of electronic Jment which Ken now holds in his is called a Blue Box. lt is a i-tone oscillator, which can uce all of the 13 once secret tone :Jinations needed to turn the d-wide telephone company into more than an obedient genie in 1ands of its possessor. On the face ne device are 12 buttons marked l,4,5,6,7,8,9,0,KP, and ST. Each iese emits two tones at one time, h like the touch tone phones being today, which, when manipulated Playing A Tune For A Number Photos by Peter Paige correctly, makes its possessor a cross country, trans-continental, overseas operator. On the top of the easy to build device is another button which emits a pure tone of 2600 cycles per second lcpsl. As soon as Mike completes the call, Ken who is already holding the box close to the mouthpiece of the ordinary pay phone, pushes the 2600 cps button. After a second the ringing stops and a slight clicking noise preceeds a sharp momentary buzz. All of a sudden there is clean, white silence. lt's cool, says Ken. We've hit a trunk. Where would you like to go? Mike says he'd like to go to Switzerland. He has a girl friend in Geneva. Ken slowly moves his finger down to the KP button on the lower left side of the cold metal face. The frequency combination of 1100 cps and 1700cps gets fed into the mouthpiece. He follows it with four other buttons: One, eight, two, and ST. All the tones are digested by the pay phone with an anti- climatic click-clunk. by Bill Jacques Flight now we're hooked up to the international sender in White Plains, explains Ken. There are seven of these senders which exist in the U.S. The others are in New York, Pittsburg, Jacksonville, Oakland, Denver, and Montreal. Each usually serves a different continent. White Plains services Europe. Do you want to go by satellite or cable? asks Ken flauntingly. l'm scared of heights, Mike answers. II I ll Lets go by cable. Now, Ken explains, all we have to do to complete the call is punch out the country code, city code, and your chick's number. The country code is 41, Ken continues as he scans down a mimeographed sheet with a long list of countries with an individual number listed beside each. So all I do is punch out KP 141, the area code 1 and dial up your chick. The KP stands for Key Punch. This tells our sender we are ready to feed it. The 1 before the country code of 41 tells it we want to go by cable., lf we had

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Rick Bowen Silver Sands: Flick Bowen. Silver Sands: Rick Bowen: 2. Nfxx, uv Z- X! ,V N by c 'xx have to spend more than that. We have to spend close to fifteen percent of our gross down here because there are so many stations and the demographics are spread out so great. Down here, we buy six stations: WBUS, WIVIYQ, WFUN, WQAIVI, VVSHE, and WSRF. D0 you think you Ill eventually expand into group management? I foresee that the concert situation will always be the backbone of anything that I do. I don't feel that l'm a good enough manager or that I have experience in that field to become an all-out professional in it. I don't feel that l have the potential to manage a stable of acts. I am capable of running my concert business and having one or two acts to manage and that's my full capability. Why are you in this business? The financial thing. lt's rewarding, usually. lt's the only kind of business -he qu? that you can lose huge sums of in and, on the other hand, make huge sums of money in a quick period of time. If you're that is. lt's just a gigantic co of things. The thing that dejects me the about the business are the young school kids that getfreaked drugs. That has been the one that has always bugged me business and I know that gonna do drugs, at their I their cars at school, and they re do them at football games and of my concerts, and that really me. That's the worst thing happening in our society today. don't get off drugs soon, I don't what's going to happen. It to death. We provide entertainment and the one thing that keeps people throughout the roughest times through the best times. People always want to be entertained just feel like that's my ieb.

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pun decided on air travel we'd punch the 0 before the country code to resewe a satellite. The last 1 before your chick's number tells Switzerland we want to land in Geneva. Once there we dial her number and . . . There is now a smooth constant ring emerging from the pay phone's receiver. Ken pockets his Blue Box and hands the call to Mike. Someone picks up the phone. II Il . I . Hello, comes a girl s voice. Hello, Cathy? asks Mike in a disbelieving manner. Mikel! How are you? The two talk for a little more than ten minutes. Mike tells her that he loves her but really must be getting off the phone. She understands and both hang up. A metal noise slides through the phone and hits the bottom with a mild cling. Mike pushes in the small shiney coin return compartment and gets his dime back. l'll buy your box, he says. The whole thing started about 20 years ago when AT8iT made a firm l ,- cl' U committment to operate it's long distance switching system on 12 different combinations of six master tones. When blended together, two of these electronically generated master tones produce a certain beat frequency. For instance, to get the long distance switching tone for the number 8 you combine 900 cycles per second with 1500 cycles per second. If you wanted the beat frequency for 7 you would couple 700 cycles per second with 1500 cycles per second. These and the other ten combinations were supposed to be kept in the strictest secrecy. But a few years ago a Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer was careless enough to list them in an article he had written for The Bell Systems Technical Journal. That article, entitled Multifrequency Signaling Systems , was soon red tagged and pulled off the shelves. But not before a few innovative phone phreaks acquired this valuable frequency data. Once this information leaked, the ability to build a tone machine capable of mimicking Ma Bell's own equipment was within the range of any teenage kid in America. Even if the l experimenting person didn't have talent or schematics to construct accurate tone generator, he simply tape the required tones cassette tape player from an organ. Example: playing F5 and will give you the multitone fr for the number 3, lroughly 900 per second and 1100 cycles secondl. A stable instrument like the H B3 or C3 is preferred by most phreaks since, when it's drawbar is pulled out, it will reproduce the frequencies well one per cent accuracy. Ma variation allotment on equipment occasionally will be as as 30 cycles per second. Soon phone phreaks, equipped their homemade multi-fr generators, the world over were each other up and fanatically technical information. Blue box rates around the country bean to confirming the ea underground telephone existance. Thousands of e parasites were flauntingly sw through Ma Bell's bloodstream.