Evan Doorbell's Phone Tapes – Brought to You by Telephone World

I grew up at the tail end of analog phone switches in my part of the country. The little town where I grew up and the surrounding towns had some kind of analog switches. Being owned by an independent telephone company the switches could have been something really oddball, too. I wish I knew what they were.

I hear sounds in some of Evan Doorbell's tapes that are familiar to me (the MF signaling when placing a long distance call, for example), but my memories of the local switch sounds are so fuzzy that I don't think I'll ever be able to identify it by sound alone. I had a magnetic pickup coil and made some phone recordings but never systematically recorded the sounds of the switches or the network. I wish I would have. At my age I never thought about those things as fleeting.

I was interested in "playing with the phone" but with no connection to the phreaking scene I didn't really know what I was doing. I remember finding some odd sounds in the "00xx" or "99xx" numbers in local exchanges but I don't know what I was hearing.

I did figure out I could call numbers "adjacent" my friends' numbers (4723 and 4725 for my friends' 4724) and they'd report hearing their phones w/ mechanical ringers sort of "buzz" but not actually ring (and we used this as a way to sneak phone calls late at night sometimes). I assume this was an artifact of the switches supporting "party lines" (multi-drop POTS services where multiple subscribers shared the same physical wire pair).

Some time in the early 90s the telco came in and replaced the switch with some flavor of Northern Telcom DMS (either a DMS-10 or a remote cluster controller from a DMS-100-- I never did find out for sure) and the "magic" was gone. We got touch tone dialing (which made wardialing practical) but the MF signaling sounds, the adjacent number ringing, the odd tones on various "00xx" and "99xx" numbers, and the crunchy static sound of the intercept messages all disappeared. The local phone exchanges became sterile and boring.

Glad to see this here. Evan Doorbell’s YouTube channel is one of my favourites ever.

this will never make front page, there's not enough AI in it