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

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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.

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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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Sell switches all her calls through types of offices. All local calls I the neighborhood Central Office e it is switched to the nearby line you are dialing. But if you 1 before the number to indicate distance, your Central Office es your call up to the area's Inter ze. This Inter Office connects rent Central Offices together and Is your call to another Inter ze in the area you are attempting each. Once there, your call is lated and advanced to the dialed 5 Central Office. Finally, the ral Office dialed rings up the Jer you want. way the Inter Office finds an ed inter toll line, or Trunk , to t its signal the long distance with 'Ier one of Ma's tones. If a Trunk le, it will whistle a pure 2600 Is per second to the searching Office. This tells the Inter Office it is neither sending nor receiving signal and is free to be used. So I your Inter Office goes looking an un-occupied Trunk it simply I one that is whistling. Once a k is seized', the whistle stops at ends of the multifrequencies are ed through to the Inter Office in rea you are calling. So if a Trunk at whistling, the Inter Office is r preparing to receive instructions nding them. It all depends which you're on. say you want to make a free call Miami to Los Angeles. First, you an 800 number of a major credit company which might happen to it's headquarters in New York. Miami Inter Office finds a :ling Trunk line to New York and 5 it. New York notices the ale silence and awaits the ifrequency tones which are pted to be shot up from Miami. I the multifrequency tones reach York they are converted and ring B00 number. :his time an accounting tape in Central Office is recording the LOS ANGELES NEW YQQK I AREA 213 AREA 2I2 ' INTER TRUNK INTER OFFICE OFFICE CENTRAL X10-VI-fl-xx OFFICE Il I MIAMI INTER AREA 305 OFFICE fl! i QF-To CENTRAL ' CD oIFIcE . r Q 9 1 4 A 1 1 l number you dialed and the time you dialed the call. But just as the New York 800 number starts ringing you hold your box up to the mouthpiece and pump 2600 cycles per second into it. The tone shoots all the way to New York where the big city's Inter Office notices it and, because the Trunk is whistling again, assumes that you have hung up and the Trunk is idle again. The New York Inter Office thus stops ringing the 800 number. But that tone only lasts for a brief second and after the Blue Box operator lifts his finger off the 2600 cycles per second button the Trunk falls silent once again. Now the Inter Office in New York awaits new routing instructions from the silent Trunk line, only this time you are it's master. So you beep off the area code for Los Angeles l213l followed by the number you want to reach. All this time your Central Office accounting system still believes you are ringing the toll free 800 number in New York. At last your party in Los Angeles answers and the Central Office in your area makes a mark on it's automatic accounting tape that you have reached a toll free number in New York. After you finish talking that same automatic accounting system records the time you hung up, but the rate is zero it per minute since, as far as the automatic accounting system is concerned, you have been talking on an 800 line. To put the situation lightly, Ma Bell is very concerned. Before this point, the advancing progress of the people's technology was always outrun by the Bell Company. An excellent example concerns the history of the pay phone. Being the most victimized of all of Ma's equipment, the once susceptible piece of equipment has now been refined to the point of near immunity to vandalism by resembling an armored fortress. A metal cable is now