Phone Trips

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. :)

>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%...

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.

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.

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...