Phone Trips

bookofjoe

>OK, so what are these recordings all about? Why are they here? >Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay and 35 years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it's true: just like the people in the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns primarily for the purpose of playing with their payphones. I often brought along my trusty Craig 212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was before cassettes were popular) to record the phone noises and narrate information about them for my friends. I don't go on phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that this is because I grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone tripping is that all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays and they are really boring. >This picture shows my recording equipment around 1968, which I used to edit these tapes and prepare them for playing on a public phone number. My current desk is just as messy, but with PC's instead of reel-to-reel tape recorders. >There have been 1237108 accesses to this page. ......................... >Secrets of the Little Blue Box (1971) https://www.ckts.info/downloads/articles/Esquire%20Magazine%...

tehryanx

I first mirrored these in the early 2000s because I was worried it would eventually vanish. my mirror has been gone for decades, and the original survives. :)

plapsley

This is such a great site. Any of Evan Doorbell's "How I Became a Phone Phreak" or "Sounds of Long Distance" are especially great.

ChrisArchitect

Related in some ways, the new documentary on the fascinating life of blind phone phreak Joybubbles . https://www.joybubblesthemovie.com/ https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/joybubbles-documentary...

zx8080

Great site! Some external links are dead (404) though: > Phone Tripper Frank Wilsey visited the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum in Seattle, WA and the New England Museum of Telephony in North Ellsworth, Maine.