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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Friend of mine bought an old rotary phone recently, and he spent some time playing with Asterisk to make it so that you could dial different numbers and get things to play. For example, he had it so you could dial "666" and it would play "Antichrist Superstar", and "Jenny" if you dialed "8675309".

I think his goal was to build a toy for his kids in the process. Or maybe just a toy for himself.

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I think I understand your friend.

I have a century+ old house and want a candlestick phone in my foyer for the effect. Asterisk is super fun. I've been looking into what it would take to candlestick (NLP->) <-> Asterisk <-> some cell phone as my "home" number. The hard part for me is that the candlestick needs to "talk to an operator." [Edit: no dialing]

I’ve been on the lookout for an old analog phone for something similar but a bit different: Home Assistant can tap into a VOIP box and provide voice AI to it so I want to have a phone that you can just pick up and have a conversation with an AI. Maybe use varying system prompts to have it emulate historical figures or celebs or something. Will be fun for my tween I think :)

A long while back, I started building out a Cold War/MAD/Dr Strangelove audio game that would have used a multi-line red telephone (basically, a high stress choose your own adventure). Never got past the initial game dev side to start working on the soft/hardware implementation side, but might have to dink around with Asterick…

My friend told me that it wasn't difficult at all, I think he got the basic setup for it in few hours, and I think once he got it set up, it wasn't difficult to simply add more phone numbers and map them to MP3's or WAV files.

I've had a contact in my phone named "The Beast" with phone number 666 for more than 20 years now. Originally came about as a joke for some high school buddies when we were EXTREMELY into Iron Maiden. Now just a dumb easter egg for myself, or I guess anyone as weird as I am who gets hold of my phone and tries calling 666.

I just did the same thing for my kids, they love rotary dialing.

Plus Grandpa can call them anytime.

I never had a rotary phone, by the time I was born (1990) touch-tone was pretty much the standard everywhere, and my parents were/are kind of "gadget people" and as such tried to keep their tech super current (we had internet in our house before any of my friends did, for example).

I've never actually used a rotary phone that was actually in service. I think I know how to dial with it, and I've played with one briefly at a GoodWill about 17 years ago. They definitely have a very satisfying "chunkiness" to them, as most clockwork gadgets tend to. I wouldn't mind picking one up but I have to fight against my hoarding tendencies, and I don't have any kids to which I can justify making them a toy.

I’m old enough that, growing up, rotaries would have worked on our phone line but not old enough to have actually had a rotary phone. It did used to cost more for touch tone service though (incredibly) and my dad was cheap so our digital phones were all set to pulse dial mode.

All the “high tech” of a digital phone with the “fun” of having to wait for the digits to pulse out! Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch so I got pretty good at dialing by tapping the switch myself.

> Also I figured out at a young age that pulse dial was just toggling the rocker switch

I saw a Cathode Ray Dude video that talked about this recently. I definitely would have enjoyed playing with this and annoying my parents if I had known that that was how it worked.

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