![]() ![]() If you wanted to make one long call last all day long it was a good deal. One card gave you several hundred minutes but there was a catch, every call you make automatically dropped a bunch of minutes. The computer at the other end relays your call to it’s destination and disconnects it when you run out of minutes.Īnyway, the gas station sold two cards, both the same price. You call a 1-800 number (free) type in a code number off of the card and then you typed the number you wanted to reach. For you younger people a calling card gave you prepaid phone minutes. The local gas station sold calling cards. I was just a little bit late to get to enjoy red boxes but I did make a lot of long distance calls. This kind of reminds me of a non-technical “hack” that I used in college. We’ll probably end up reposting this one in another ten years. RadioShack does not sell the pocket phone dialer anymore, but they do sell a DTMF chip (an NTE1690) that can do column D (the interesting bits that make all the phreakers happy). We really didn’t want to edit this because it’s a repost of the first Hackaday post ever, but and dug out the old RadioShack pocket tone dialer, found a payphone (!), and tried it out: the most popular device to modify was a radioshack tone dialer, a simple solder of a 6.5536 mhz crystal was all it took and you could “drop” 5, 10 and 25 cents at a time to make calls. a “red box” was a device that would simulate coins being dropped in to a pay-phone, hence free phone calls for many people until the phone systems changed. I thought i’d start out with this hack while we’re in beta, since it was one of the first ones that really got me interested in the way phones worked and how many consumer electronics can be used for new and educational things. ![]()
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