Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

Just last month I got the opportunity to assist with an art installation that involved a phonebooth, which meant I got to take one home and poke around its insides. It was some of the most delightfully 90s tech I've seen in a while - 2-layer PCBs, all through-hole components, only a few well-known ICs... I ended up carefully removing all the "brains" and hooking up the insides to a raspberry pi, which could join a Discord channel or answer an incoming call when you picked up the phone.

Standing next to the phone talking to friends was strangely fun and nostalgic experience, despite the fact I had only used a payphone once in my life. I got a cellphone very quickly (perks of having a tech journalist in the family), so by the time I was old enough to be able to buy a phone card with my own money I no longer needed it. During the pandemic, all of the remaining phonebooths in the country were quietly shut down and dismantled.

I know it's completely irrational, but I'm still sad that I had to eventually return the one I worked on and that in the many years the system was still operational it never occurred to me to buy a card and call someone from a phone booth just for the fun of it.

P.S.: If anyone from Slovenia or other ex-Yu countries has any ideas how I could get my hands on one of those Iskra payphones, drop me an email (address in bio). I have so many ideas for projects involving them, but it seems that I'm a bit too late to stand behind the Telekom dumpster and snag a few before they're scrapped.

I worked at a telco a little over ten years ago when they took out all the pay phones in our city. In the garage there were these enormous bins full of them, staged for some unknown fate. A couple colleagues and I had gone down to take a look at the spectacle and inquired if we could take one, and they were like, “sure!”. We climbed in an grabbed ourselves some payphones. Still have one in my garage - I think it’s cool as shit.

Seems weird, to me, that you would need a card. Every phone booth I've used took dimes, then quarters.

Some, near the end, could take a credit card or a telco card.

I presume you could buy the cards back in the day, anywhere and easily?

Not sure where GP was, but in NZ which I think was fairly typical, pay phone cards were introduced in 1989 - you could buy them at nearly any corner shop. I think the big advantages were coin collectors no longer being necessary (they were a huge overhead!), and vandalism to steal the coins being no more.

In Austria at least, this was quite common. I remember that the phone booth in our school only accepted a phone card and almost every pupil had one for emergency cases. You could buy them easily in magazine shops.

For at least the last 25 years of operation, all of our phone booths only took smartcards that you could buy in basically any store or news stand.

Interesting.

Seems the same elsewhere, too, as per other replies.

I recall our phones, as I said, having a card slot and coin slot at the end.

I wonder if they retrofitted, with the goal of getting people used to cards, before removing the change slot entirely. This logic seems typical here.

But then the smartphone explosion happened, so just decided to never buy new payphones with slots only.

EG, rather than phase out for card only, they'd have years of spare parts and phones, as they slowly removed booths.

At least over here in the EU coins were later substituted by magnetic phone cards; iirc in the late 80s, presumably as a measure against vandalism and theft. When phone booths were later decommissioned, all those cards became collectibles and still have a market online.

Vy any chance, did you write about the project somewhere? I have a similar project on the back burner, but with a rotary-dial handset, and I doubt a pi could provide enough juice to ring.

I plan to write a blog post about it soon™, but my schedule is absolutely packed this month, so probably not for a while. Here's a placeholder link: https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth

I'm using two of those 2€ sound cards from China to drive the handset and ringer speakers and both work quite well. I would probably need to add a small amplifier if I wanted the ringer to be heard from the street through the metal enclosure and plexiglass booth, but that wasn't a requirement for this project.

In North America, ringing takes about 100 volts, but any control will do. Link the control circuit to an ice cube relay, then have that control the higher voltage.

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