[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

My first modem was 300 baud, manual dial. So I had to use my landline to dial, then flip a switch on the modem to co to computer mode. Soon, I realized I really needed a second phone line. AT&T owned everything on the system, and customer only rented the phones in the house. I was supposed to tell AT&T I was using a modem, so they could charge me the business rate. I kept forgetting to tell them.

In the early 80s we had moved back to the US from Japan. We had a phone line that had a phone downstairs in the living room, I think (or was it the kitchen). We were living in a townhouse. My parents wanted a phone upstairs in their bedroom, and the wiring was there, so they bought a phone. After we'd had the phone for a while, the telco called and said "we 'hear' two phones ringing when you get a call. You must have a second phone, but you're only renting one from us." I think my parents said "no, we only have one phone. It must be something weird on the line." From then on they left the phone upstairs unplugged until they wanted to use it and then they'd plug it in. It was a phone just like this one.



When I was a senior in HS, there was a kid in my Physics class. He'd been "caught" by the FBI. He got a modem and had quickly run up a several hundred dollar telephone bill (this was in the mid 80s). He realized that the telco "listened" for the touch tones (listened for a voltage change due to the "beep" when a button was pressed). He eventually discovered that the mute button on the phone didn't kill the signal, it just attenuated it. Apparently if you muted the line and then dialed, the system that performed the connection was sensitive enough to hear the muted dialing and connect you, but the system that realized that you'd made a call wasn't sensitive enough to realize that you'd dialed and made a call. So his parent's tel bill went from several hundred dollars to nothing. They eventually figured it out and the FBI came and said "stop that, and if you show/explain what you did, we won't prosecute."