Hacker News Reader

Comment by barbs | Hacker News Reader

I always found it interesting that payphones could receive calls in America. Australian payphones can't receive calls (at least, not to my knowledge), and it always seemed like it would be ripe for abuse if they could.

View on HN

It made sense originally. Most people did not originally have telephones at home. It skewed towards businesses, and then public venues like hotels. Almost immediately, a secondary business started up around each telephone. A grocery store, for example, might let customers place outgoing calls for a small fee, and reserve slots for incoming calls, and take messages. A single phone might be installed on the ground floor of an apartment building, and one of the retirees became the building phone operator.

As you might imagine, a lot of free outgoing calls were snuck in. Just pick it up when the clerk isn't looking. And no one wants to sit around all day guarding the phone, anyway. And so payphones. In those environments, you'd want them to be able to receive calls at a pre-arranged time, as well as place them. And it just kinda carried forward. But many regions in North America did start prohibiting incoming calls on payphones eventually. You couldn't do that in the 90s where I grew up in Canada.

You can 100% call Australian payphones. Last week I stood next one in the Sydney CBD and called it, it rung - I didn't pick up.

Here's a list with physical addresses and phone numbers. Enjoy.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/B15mu7h/Payphones/master/P...

Username checks out!

Wow, didn't know about this at all. Will be experimenting with these for sure. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com