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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

I think it was around 1988 in NL when I obtained a DTMF-gagdet for very little money, probably intended for operating answering machines remotely.

However, while the Dutch pay-phone booths had their rotary-dial blocked by the pay-mechanism, the line was 'open'. We called all around the world, in particular to Japan because apparently this was the most expensive ( rates were listed in the phone book ).

Around this time I also did my share of 'war calling' with my first modem ( I forgot the proper term ). Memory is hazy, but I recall hitting some prompts, but had no idea what to do, I had never seen a Unix or similar.

Around the same time, I read the C bible while on a camping holiday with my parents. I remember it was though material for a 14 year old. I owned an Acorn Electron at the time.

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In the US around the late 80's we could buy a DTMF dialer from Radio Shack and change the oscillator crystal to a different value that would enable the device to produce the same tones as the $0.25 quarter sound that a payphone would make when you dropped a coin into it. That was a lot of phun.

"war dialing" was using a computer to repeatedly dial random passcodes on a PBX or similar system to try to make free calls. A commodore 64 was used quite a bit for this, dialing all night long you'd wake up to about 5 or 6 valid codes that you could then use for about a week to dial BBSs all over the planet for free.

There were plenty of other ways to get free phone calls. It was a really interesting part of the 'underground' of computing back in the day.

I had one of those radio shack dialers. They were still selling them in 1998, but were suspicious when you asked for that crystal. The intent was to store phone numbers in it, slap it up to the microphone and let it dial for you. I may or may not have added a second crystal and a switch to pick which crystal to use.

In the memory you could store the tones for a nickel, dime and quarter. Maybe this was a red box? It worked great provided you dropped at least one physical coin to trigger the switch in the phone.

By leaving the original crystal in, it was also a white box, if I'm remembering right. I only ran into one phone that it was useful on. If the phone was setup so you had a dial tone, but the keypad was disabled until you paid, you could dial with the device - just like rat shack intended.

I'm sure I lost more on parts than I gained in calls - that wasn't really the point. Good times!

My start was ~91-92 in NL too, playing with a DTMF generator on payphones on the walk to/from school. We had more luck with the phones in hotel/museum foyers as they were usually not updated as often. I remember hanging out at the skate ramp near the Rijksmuseum and taking it in turns running over to the payphone near the entrance to try the latest tricks someone had passed on. Then a friend's dad got an internet connection and it changed our lives forever.

It was also possible to pulse the receiver switch emulating an old rotary phone clicks, if that phone had a lock that only activated the mic when you put a payment in. Did this many times on pub phones that were intended just to dial a taxi too. Fun times

Acorn Atom :-) didn't know they sold them outside the UK.

The Atom was the predecessor to the BBC micro

I had seen the Atom in an electronics store ( the kind which sold resistors and stuff ).

Electron's were dumped by Acorn at the time and obtainable for a very fair price through a Dutch retailer/discounter (Quantum, which sold carpets and stuff).

My school actually had a fully equipped BBC B classroom, with server, with coprocessor and networked. But this was an exception, it was quite an elite/forward-thinking school.

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