plapsley
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
97
Submissions
33
Member since
Oct 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
+1 to this! If you have any interest in telephones, telephone switching, or phreaking, this place is incredible. And the people who run it are awesome.
Comment · 1 month ago
Thanks for the kind words! And it's funny, when I saw this story on HN my first thought was "loop arounds and talkable busy signals!" :-).
Comment · 1 month ago
I just came back from the The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) in the UK at Bletchley Park. It was fantastic. They have a wide variety of working systems that you can play with, from home computers to mainframes, as well as Bombes and the Colossus (used to break the Lorenz cipher), and WITCH. Very cool. https://www.tnmoc.org/
Quasi-related: If you're into old telephone switching equipment (some of which is computer-based), the Connections Museum in Seattle is not to be missed.
Comment · 6 months ago
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.
Comment · 6 months ago
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.
Comment · 9 months ago
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.
Comment · 10 months ago
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!
Comment · 1 year ago
That's awesome, thank you!
Comment · 1 year ago
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. :-)
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks for the mention and honored to be in the same mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!
Comment · 1 year ago
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...
Comment · 1 year ago
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.
Comment · 1 year ago
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>
Comment · 2 years ago
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
Comment · 2 years ago
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
Co-author of Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP, RFC 977).
Oh, and a book on digital signal processing: "DSP Processor Fundamentals".