Comment Re:bad deal. (Score 1) 449
If there is one thing I can say about POTS, it had to be the absolute least secure way possible of conducting a phone call. All the signals were pure clean analog, in the clear, and you could tap in on any of them at a telco connection block with just a headset and listen right in. Remember those phones the linemen would wear on their belts... thats how they found where the line went bad - just clip in and and see if they had a good line. Red and green... tip and ring. They were not even polarity sensitive until the touchtone pads came out. They would put 20 hz on the line to ring it, then put something like 48 volts through a resistor to the line to power up your microphone and dial, and you had a little inductive coupler to pick the signal back off the line to run the earpiece.
The telephone company back in the 60's and 70's had their RIAA-style heyday with a lot of kids using "blue boxes" and the like to make free calls or prank calls through the long distance system. The magazine "2600" originated with this... it turns out one guy, going by the moniker "Captain Crunch" started spreading the word that General Mills just happened to distribute a little plastic whistle in boxes of breakfast cereal for a kid's toy, and this whistle just happened to emit one of the frequencies ( 2600 Hz ) which would divert a call to an 800 number to an outgoing trunk. Hilarity ensued there for a while. When I was a kid, it was all the rage to rip off the phone company for unpaid-for calls... many of which were prank calls to overseas for "bragging rights".
The telephone company back in the 60's and 70's had their RIAA-style heyday with a lot of kids using "blue boxes" and the like to make free calls or prank calls through the long distance system. The magazine "2600" originated with this... it turns out one guy, going by the moniker "Captain Crunch" started spreading the word that General Mills just happened to distribute a little plastic whistle in boxes of breakfast cereal for a kid's toy, and this whistle just happened to emit one of the frequencies ( 2600 Hz ) which would divert a call to an 800 number to an outgoing trunk. Hilarity ensued there for a while. When I was a kid, it was all the rage to rip off the phone company for unpaid-for calls... many of which were prank calls to overseas for "bragging rights".