What Did the Old Telephone Network Sound Like? Overview of the Recordings

[@roachtoasties]

You were one dedicated Phone Phreak. I don't know anyone else with the tenacity to record 2,000 hours of stuff from decades ago in their younger years, keep it all, have it all annotated so they can create videos like this today. I lose notes I've taken just from last week. :/

[@evandoorbell4278]

Thanks! And by the way, Ben was much more tenacious than me. I could barely stand to go two hours at a payphone while he had lots more stamina.

[@NorseGodFimbulthulr1]

Criminally underrated channel. Thank you for preserving communications history!

[@tylerhynes0]

Evan your name and my name are greek names your name Evans is the male version of the Virgin mary

[@tylerhynes0]

Evan i grew up listening to Jane barber's if you like to make a call please hang up and try again if you need help hang up and dial your operator thank you tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

[@grindz145]

This is so true! Amazingly good content!

[@QEsposito510]

I’m 4 years late but you are the man. It doesn’t occur to very many people that tech like this should be archived for one day it will be history. Everyone’s just too busy living it with no appreciation.

[@sillysurgeon]

Evan, I love the way your mind works. The way you describe being able to "feel the distance", your appreciation for the seemingly mundane, the joy you take in just sitting and listening to different sounds. Your passion is infectious, and your recordings have made an impact on mine (and I'm sure many others') life.

[@CerdurTV]

I'm 21 and think it's interesting how much more compressed the current call quality is compared to those older examples. also it's fun to hear the kids all trying to talk to each other in that call, makes me reflect on how teenagers today voice chat with each other differently

[@johnholiday4622]

Now I'm 21 I don't like this growing older shit too much

[@joshschoonover6429]

Implementing digital switching equipment almost seems to have made call quality worse since it only had an 8 kHz sampling rate. VoLTE on modern cell phones thankfully sounds much, much better.

[@TacoCrisma]

Calls are compressed because of the massively increased volume of traffic today vs the 60s.

[@ronb6182]

I remember when calling Florida from Pennsylvania you would hear computer sounds before your call went through. Kinda miss the old phone. Even more fun dialing with the hook switch instead of using the dial. My friend taught me that trick. It didn't work on all phones though. I can hook the phone to a telephone tester and sometimes a one would come up on the display. When hanging up the phone. At work I would listen to all the sit tones. Reorder and vacate to name a few. We used to call it the im sorry tone. I'm sorry the number your dialed is in error. 73

[@Tomsonic41]

I was born one decade too late to hear most of this stuff. But I still remember letting the dial tone run out, then hearing snippets of other people's calls via crosstalk! IIRC our local exchange was still mechanical until around 1994.

[@hschieck]

This puts me back in time - back into a whole other world, actually. It was such a fascinating thing as a teenager, trying to find hidden services and features within the telephone network. We were looking for remote computers in most cases, that would answer our modem. It was a real-world adventure, searching the network. These sounds instantly bring back memories I assumed being forgotten long ago. The magic feeling of recognizing a world beyond our homes - Something that, albeit inadequately, today could be described as a glimpse of the world of cyberspace.

[@singinglawnchair]

These are so good, I listen to these like podcasts and have them on in the background. I was a 90s kid so a lot of this kind of stuff was being phased out but this is absolutely fascinating! I used to listen to these on your website but I'm glad they're on KZbin now. Thank you so much for sharing!

[@covert0overt_810]

subbed... loving this history.. seems like the old system had almost a life of its own... its hummed.. buzzed.. creaked... had variety.. and had a mechanical organic sound.. Queens forever :)

[@evandoorbell4278]

A life of its own… Exactly! I used to feel the same way about a real grand piano.

[@covert0overt_810]

@@evandoorbell4278Im sure youve watched it - but THX1138 (george lucas first movie) has some of the best analog phone effects ever .. even to this day. i highly recommend it

[@covert0overt_810]

@@evandoorbell4278 unironically i lived off Steinway (on Ditmars) right around the corner from the factory.. those were good times in Astoria

[@melaniec1074]

The crosstalk "party line" stuff 11:24 , 21:22 , 23:05 , 24:09 has absolutely blown my mind.

[@aviationandrew8182]

This is fantastic, I just recently finished reading “Exploding the Phone” and it’s great to hear these recordings! Thanks for sharing your experiences!

[@evandoorbell4278]

Thanks for letting me know. (And by the way, I'm the narrator of the "Exploding The Phone" audio book from Audible.)

[@tropicalpancake56]

Hi Evan! Well remember these sounds from childhood and also as a long distance operator for Michigan Bell and AT+T, starting in the late seventies. After different assignments throughout the years, I retired in 2005. Had so much fun with the very first job of my career. Thank you for all of these gems.

[@PhantomKode]

This is one of the most interesting things I have ever listened to.

[@StevenBlaugh-zt8gn]

Evan, I had a neighborhood friend growing up whose father worked at the telephone company and thus was the mid-seventies to early eighties era, before the digital conversion wiped lol of these unique conn croon protocols and the sounds that went with them. I this was able to learn a few telephony tidbits of my own and thought it would be fun to share. First, when you hear the ring tone when placing a call, a that moment the phone at the place you are calling is silent and vice versa. Maybe calling knowledge, but here is some more. The computer which picks and plays the recording loops, at least in the Los Angeles area, Pacific Bell territory, was named Ramona. In the early eighties, if I recall correctly, recordings began to be preceded by three loud tones, each a higher note than the one before it and this three- tone sequence was called a woohoo tone. First, thank you so much for the great incredible knowledge of all things phones you have shared! Someone like the late, great Art Bell would have loved to interview you. You have the perfect voice for narrating this kind of content! Your shared recordings are clear as a bell, literally, and you have brought it all back to life a nicely! To end here, I would really enjoy learning about the mysterious, invisible (to us phone freakers) Ramona computer if you or Ben happen to know and wanted to put that on any future recordings. Thanks again for your amazing and fascinating channel!!!

[@evandoorbell4278]

Thanks for the kind words! However, I've never heard of Ramona and I'm not sure what you're referring to

[@xenon1806]

Not even sure what KZbin rabbit hole brought me to this but I found it very interesting

[@DamnableReverend]

This was really cool. In the 80s here in southern Ontario, when i was a kid, you could still hear some of this variety of sounds. Everything changed by the early 90s, and calling random numbers wasn't really as fun. By the time I started learning about blue boxes and such, all that stuff was already long gone, much to my chagrin.

[@bryanadams256]

9:41 I remember in the 70's, we had an operator's strike. When you dialed "0" you ended up on a party line. People would yell out their phone numbers and call each other. Many would go out on blind dates! Kinda the beginning of "Social Media".

[@steve94044]

I love hearing these old phone call setup’s!

[@unclebbmunson1084]

My mom was an operator in NY. In 1954. She could see when her mom picked up the receiver. There # was SP 6- 2132. It lit up on her plug board.

[@melaniec1074]

This comment is gold 🌟

[@melaniec1074]

51:00 Beautiful, comforting sound

[@musicmanfelipe]

I found your recordings when I was in high school 20 years ago, and it got me interested in phone technology. I also read Exploding the Phone and was fascinated by all the stories. In fact, I bought the audio version just so I could hear you narrate it!

[@Mujangga]

And you have such a perfect voice for this sort of thing too.

[@rvairplanesrd]

Amazing to heard again those sounds, I still remember the diferents tones of the central office in my hometown in the Dominican Republic while the company replaced central office equipments. Wow

[@ripj5301]

This is fascinating, I did not expect to watch as much of this when I started haha

[@59phonebone]

I miss these sounds. We had a party line like that in Cupertino California. I was a bit of a phone phreak as a teen and knew Cap’n Crunch. I used to make cassette recordings like this. 📼

[@wenglemeister]

this is the coolest thing i have ever seen in my life thanks man

[@judyjones5089]

I was growing up in Colorado Springs during the late 50s and early 60s, and remember tones and ringers. Melrose (63) I believe, was the only exchange at that time in the Springs. We had two phones in our house and you could call your phone number, hang up and ring both phones, since we were on the same phone line. It was a great way to way to use as an intercom.

[@bronzehelm6046]

This may be the most interesting presentation I've enjoyed on KZbin. By the way, your point about the quality of modern cell networks is well taken. One thing I've never understood is that among all the bells and whistles on modern handsets, literally no one ever raises the issue of call quality. I guess there's some new technologies such as Volte which do address it though. Thanks again for an amazing video, which is best enjoyed with headphones.

[@vrzn]

I'm not even that old, I just had a little bit of life without cellphones. But I really miss these old electromechanical times. Now it's all computers, and even more computers

[@denelson83]

Evan, even though you're now in your 60's, you still sound like a 30-something.

[@RudyValenciaDotCom]

He still does sound young indeed!

[@raphaeltoast]

Love the grittiness of these recordings.

[@stvpls]

here in italy pots still going strong, most switchboards are modern (should be) but you can still hear fine the click clack when dialing outside the town and the background sounds are different

[@francescobelletta]

Solo se utilizzi linee RTG. Dagli attacchi fibra ormai è tutto in Voip, purtroppo. Ragione per cui continuo a tenere anche la linea tradizionale.

[@stvpls]

@@francescobelletta esatto fai benissimo

[@stevesly285]

The Narrator has an excellent voice for Radio and TV, calming

[@kyledavidson8712]

I'm super excited for these new vids I find this fascinating

[@bsadewitz]

When I got into this as a teenager (1995-1998) the, most of this infrastructure had long since been upgraded. I found one SxS office in Miami, TX. I used to call toll-free "country direct" numbers that used CCITT#5 (I think) signalling and attempt to seize trunks and dial out. When I was doing this, I think the long-distance "sound" was mostly due to the multiplexing strategy they used. It wasn't crosstalk per se, but rather the multiplexing strategy they used, I think. You'd hear bits of white noise cutting in and out during gaps in the conversation. The frequency response of that intraoffice call is astounding. I have never heard anything like that. What were you using to do these recordings, an inductive tap? I got into this at the very tail end of when it was even possible; most of the actual chat took place on IRC. Wow, I don't even know where to start--I haven't recalled many of these memories in years. Nearly all of my blueboxing took place via the country direct toll-free number for Greece, though I had some success with Belize, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Getting this right was difficult, because it wasn't just 2600hz, but rather 2600+2400, then 2400. It would wink back after each. Some of these were _very,_ strict with these timings, and, man, those poor operators HATED me ...

[@vassiliss8506]

Greetings from a Greek phreak ;)

[@jgrysiak6566]

By the end of 1986, all of the old infrastructure was upgraded to Digital switching by Bell of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh & Western PA

[@tylerhynes0]

@@vassiliss8506 geia sou xeromai poli meno sto union city nj sth ameriki h katagogoi tou baba mou einai apo th laconia sparti tou baba mou o babas h katagogoi einai apo th rexia laconia sparti kai ths mama's tou baba mou einai apo th kyparissi laconia sparti kai h mama's mou katagogoi einai apo th morphou kypros kai meniko kypros

[@vassiliss8506]

@@tylerhynes0 Χάρηκα :)

[@bsadewitz]

@@vassiliss8506 Awesome! Nice to make your acquaintance. ;-) Do they still use in-band signalling anywhere? Somehow, I doubt it. I can still recall the operators frustration when I'd mess up and fail to seize the trunk. "Athena?!?!??!!!!!"

[@bluekewne]

The audio nature of this made it really amazing to put on as background noise as I was cleaning up my room - very informative too!

[@billybassman21]

Funny how innocent while mature people were back then. I used to do this in the 80s calling the radio and TV station contest hotlines which all had the same exchange back then. They were always busy when I called, usually a fast busy. I would even have the phone in my hand waiting for them to come on and give the number to call, but it was always busy. I noticed other people were coming on there and hanging up while the busy tone was going on. A few times I gave a kid my number or they gave me theirs and we would call each other and talk. Sometimes when I would call out to them they would ask "am I a winner".

[@supercattelephone]

I finally picked up a Western Electric 2500 and an X link gateway box to start playing with phones again. I also have a model 554 I'm working on. I was never able to play with the phone when I was younger but when I was a kid around 10 years ago I still used to check rare stray payphones for dial tone.

[@charliedontsurf70]

These videos are fascinating, I grew up in the 70's and I remember a lot of these signals and sounds.

[@user-mj8nf2vp7q]

...I grew up in Charlotte, NC 70s/80s. I did "play on the phone" sometimes. When we'd visit my grandparents in Anderson Co., SC during holidays I'd sometimes dial our home phone back in Charlotte from my grandfather's study; just to listen to the ringing, knowing full well that no one was home. We did have some very pleasant sounding recordings if you'd reach a wrong number, etc. in the Charlotte area. I know that many recordings were nationwide, but I seldom reached an unpleasant phone recording within our area. I also used to listen to the recordings and the busy tones repeat for minutes at a time before disconnecting. In other words, I was a very weird kid. Sure wish I'd known about the significance of cross-talk, although I did sometimes hear extremely muted cross-talk over busy tones, etc. without paying it any mind. The clicks, humming, & connecting sounds always fascinated me! Incidentally, my Mom was an operator (later service dispatcher), with Southern Bell before giving up her career to rear my twin brother and I. She emphasized phone etiquette with us, coaching us to quip: "Who's Calling Please?" / "I'm Sorry You Have The Wrong Number" etc., as a matter of common courtesy, carrying over from her days with Southern Bell. My work at times involves customer service, & I sometimes must ask customers on their cellphones to repeat their like sounding vowels/consonants (b, c, d, e, z, g, j, a, etc.), from my handset-receiver desk phone when creating customer accounts/records, involving the precise spelling of their name(s). Sure, my landline work phone still uses digital technology, but cell phones have lousy sound, both inbound and outbound. Add to that the use of speakerphone mode, & overall lousy mush-mouth enunciation; (which is now the norm, not the exception due the dumbing down of society), & you have frustration at certain times. 👍🏽💯😊📞☎️🤳📲

[@melaniec1074]

Hello from SC!!! I used to play around with my grandmother's phone when I was a kid because their rural dial tone was so much "cooler" than ours! I got in a little bit of trouble dialing long distance numbers just to hear the tones. I would hang up right away but my grandmother would still get charged! My ex-bf lives in Anderson!

[@evandoorbell4278]

In the late 70s and early 80s Southern Bell, in North Carolina, tried to always use Jane Barbe recordings. Meanwhile, the automatic intercept system was also voiced by Jane Barbe. Thus Bell System, North Carolina was a good place for a Pleasant voice on intercept recordings.

[@timmack2415]

What a great video this is! It brings back many memories.

[@jasonsignor7237]

When my brother and I were kids, we used to call all the error codes. We had a list of them. And we gave them names. The Crimmy, Shoshy Beans, and The 852, just to name a few. 😂

[@tomkounnas4997]

Evan is brilliant. I wish I understood the story behind the technology back in the day

[@TacoCrisma]

Thank you for making this, it’s amazing. It’s sad such technology has been lost to time. I vaguely remember SxS sounds as a kid in the 90s from a local CO in my city (Rochester NY) probably one of the last. We share a rich telco history being the headquarters of Paetec - where I used to work and learned about all of this. To date, it remains my favorite job. I used to look forward to going to work every day there. Telco is fascinating.

[@RingwayManchester]

I’ve just discovered my new favourite channel!

[@jondstewart]

:51, that sound was at my grandparents home in the 1970’s and was common in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

[@ronb6182]

Maybe in all your recordings you may find a phone company that required to make a long distance call you had to dial 1,5,0 to make the call. Dialing 1 was not enough to make the call. I remember north Pittsburgh phone company was kinda different. We still had the big long fuses and the black wire coming into the house. I don't know how they could know which one was tip and which one was ring. I think the phone had a third wire which was hooked to ground. Mom reduced the private line to a party line to save money but when I could not call home from school because the line was tied up with someone hanging on the line. Mom changed back to a private line. I sure miss land line phones, I used to dial the numbers by clicking the hook switch instead of using the dial. Phones were fun but I missed out on talking through the busy signal. Maybe it didn't work where I lived. But I got my share of girls calling me on the weekend that I didn't know. They were from my JR Highschool but they never talked to me at school. Maybe they were too shy. I was the same when in person. Phone conversations were easier than in person. 73

[@evandoorbell4278]

Party line phones DO have to use all three wires because the bell is wired from either tip or from ring to ground. The 1+ 50 was away of telling the equipment which party you were on the line. Only the independent companies did this; in the bell system, if you had more than two parties on the line, an operator would always have to come on the line briefly and ask "your number please?" I actually never got a chance to record dialing one of those access codes/"circle digits" on a long distance call

[@kennixox262]

I'm certainly old enough to remember those days. We were on the GTE system rather than the Bell System which served the east coast of Florida. The west coast of the state was more of a back water until the 1970's.

[@batlin]

I encountered one of those "crosstalk party line" situations here in Dublin just once when I was a young teenager. It was much later than the recordings here, maybe around 1994. Perhaps they were converting our local exchange to a fully digital system at the time, I don't know, but when I picked up the handset there was no dialtone, just low static, with a sort of metallic hum over which I could faintly make out a lot of confused "hello? hello???" voices. At the time I remember picturing an image of everyone in my suburb standing around a gigantic metal cube and touching it. Around that time I read a lot about phone phreaking in the US, and tried some of the methods here, even writing a tone generator program on my Atari ST and experimenting to see if the famous tones like 2600hz, or the weird A/B/C/D DTMF sounds had any effect. Unfortunately not.

[@Johnsolerokar]

This is way more interesting than anything I’ve learned in history class…

[@neohistoryfan1014]

I am an upperclassman in high school and my parents remember these sounds!

[@shadowsimjk]

It's strange how when I was younger, all calls regardless of the actual quality, sounded to me like "real life". As I've later relistened to some recordings of shortwave radio I made back then, I can't hear anything, but in my memory of making that recording everything was perfectly clear to me back then. And yeah, today when I make a call and my phone says VoLTE, it sounds like "real life" to me, and when it falls back to AMR-WB or NB, or even worse, it sounds like some sort of primitive tech :) Looking forward to a future video of digital phone sound systems, starting from the vocoders of 40s :)

[@bsadewitz]

Cassette tape isn't good in the long term. The clarity was probably due to the connection being analog and within the same switch. There was no reason for it to filter anything out. These days, they use a sampling rate that excludes frequencies that they don't have to support.

[@bsadewitz]

There were vocoders used in the PTSN in the 40s? IIRC there were working vocoders in the 30s (I think they had some speech synthesis working) , but the memory is faint and I could be wrong.

[@gregbooker3535]

"everything was perfectly clear to me back then" -----------A similar sentiment: I think must of us teens in the 1980's didn't have a single complaint about the sound-qualify of tape cassettes. There can be no doubting that humanity becomes more and more spoiled as technology becomes more advanced.

[@shadowsimjk]

@@gregbooker3535 Or then it's just a testament to the brain's capability of filling in the blanks? :)

[@evandoorbell4278]

It wasn't until 2017 that I finally digitized all the cassettes I recorded in 1977, and all but one or two of them suffered no audio dead degradation. However, the pressure pads inside the cassettes did go bad, so I had to transplant the tapes into new cassette shells before they sounded right.

[@NipkowDisk]

So great to hear these sounds again almost a half-century later. I grew up on the original EMerson exchange in north Seattle which I think was a No. 1 or No. 5 Crossbar as you could often hear the MF tones when calling out of the CO such as weather (662-1111), etc... on another note, I also need to pay a visit to the museum down on Corson Avenue post-COVID.

[@steveburton9242]

We were ULrick in Kent. I remember 662-1111. Long lost memories.

[@TheOnePhillip]

Wow! I'm glad I listened to this in the daylight. Those sounds use to scare the piss out of me when I was a kid. I'm a 54 yr old man now and they still scare me😱

[@ericjumpelfeaturingjohnnyj4135]

Love this collection of phone recordings you have, E.D.!!

[@blindsportslover]

For a guy that broke into a phone system, you sure as hell do not sound like you did. your voice sounds so relaxing. Is it you that reads exploding the phone? I might get that off of Audible.

[@evandoorbell4278]

Yes I am the narrator for the Audible version of Exploding The Phone.

[@tylerhynes0]

That party line sounds fun ! My parents grew up with the party line

[@pelehosmusic]

Im 21 and work a job that frequently involves phone calls. To hear the quality of a phone from before i was even a concept. The phone quality is so much better. Now with discord and video calls the audio is decent if not very clear. but the regular phone app on every phone and its network are a huge step back in quality for the sake of the convenience of calling anywhere

[@awguy]

This is utterly fascinating... Especially the part about teenagers meeting on the cross talk. I've just put "Exploding the Phone" on my audible wish list.

[@jaminjef]

We used to call that Hotline back in the mid to late 70's. It was hard to talk over the noise so we used to try to exchange phone numbers in the gaps between the noise.

[@Crissy0003]

@@jaminjef I remember that, too. Kids would say the digits of their phone number in between each beep of the busy signal, and then say "Got it?"

[@melaniec1074]

@@jaminjef This blows my mind!

[@thatjpwing]

I grew up in a GTE/Continental Telephone/Contel service area. We had a party line until the early 1980s. Until the mid 1980s we could call within our exchange with only the last five digits of a phone number. When I moved to Clinton, Mass. in 1988, local calls would ring-ring and non-local calls would have a regular ring. I always found that very odd.

[@evandoorbell4278]

That IS odd. I have never heard of that happening (other than in a Private Branch Exchange for a business.)

[@DoyleFM]

I used to record phone calls & sounds using those receiver suction cups that only audio junkies would recognize. This "video" is SPECTACULAR! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 🇺🇸

[@dcsmooth]

Ok, the teenagers cross talking sounds like they’re trapped in some other dimensional plane of existence and they’re begging to get out. “Hello?? Hello???? Can you hear me???” I just wonder if one of them, now in their 70’s or 80’s would recognize their voice as a teen. Creepy.

[@TheArtyBartfast]

This is so great. I can't believe that there are recordings of this ephemera. What do I need to be recording today for my future self?

[@TechHowden]

Nothing interesting to record anymore

[@jonnaking3054]

When I was little I dialed a strange number, it was 123456789*0#. I would get the long distance tone, then a recording of a male voice would come on saying something like, "The number you have dialed is a test, 234-5678, Hang up now, otherwise billing will be arranged for this call" and it would charge on the phone bill. And sometimes when I would hang up I couldn't get the dial tone back for a few minutes and the phone would just be dead. Then sometime when I would call it a loud scary alarm would sound followed by what sounded like a female voice miming a busy signal, then other times just the female voice miming a busy signal.... Still curious as to what this was. Does it sound familiar?

[@zigforjustice]

Really really cool. I remember back in the '90s when dialing from PA to WV, we went from MCI to AT&T and had to dial some access number I think. We then got "thank you for using AT&T". I wasn't very old, so I'm a bit fuzzy on that, so if anyone has more details, that'd be great!

[@adamv4951]

Yes, that's correct! I recall this too.

[@ECLynn]

I feel lucky that I got to use the “party line” as a teen. We’d pass around the number in school, and it was true that this never made it to the media nor was it known by most parents.

[@evandoorbell4278]

Thanks for speaking up. We rarely hear from former "party line" people. Was "party line" what it was called in Toronto?

[@ECLynn]

@@evandoorbell4278 Yes. I don’t know if anyone understood the mechanics behind it. It only lasted a short time, maybe it came back later when I wasn’t a teen anymore. It was around 1972. Some lines had dead air, on others you had to talk around a repeat recording. Eventually we’d be jammed by beeping and I think I remember a recording about the beeps being a “central jamming system”. Now I don’t know if that was Bell Canada’s doing or some prankster.

[@LaserGryph]

55:31 Jeez. All the enthusiasm of a sleep deprived mortician.

[@TechHowden]

Part of that is just because of the carrier system

[@TriRabbi]

I could whistle the 2600 Hz with my mouth back in the day. I just tried now, but it seems I can't do it anymore.

[@jeffreywitczak9840]

I still have those TDK and Scott tapes in my collection today

[@jonnaking3054]

When I was little in the 80s I seem to remember different phone numbers having different ring tones

[@Thegonagle]

I was little in the 80’s too, and they most definitely did. Sometimes I “got the feeling,” so to speak, that I had called the wrong number before anybody answered. It just wouldn’t sound the way I expected it to.

[@waverider227]

I remember phoning my friend down the block back in the mid 80s and I remember hearing people talking faintly in the background justl like 8:40 along with computer modem dial tones . Now i know it is called "Crosstalk"

[@JVC516]

It's funny, but in the early 70's through the early 80's, I thought I was the ONLY one who liked to listen to, record, and save telephone and intercept recordings. The recording at 11:12 is exactly what he had on Long Island back then. However, after the recording would finish, there would be a quick 'rewind' sound and it would give the code 5168. It would then go on to repeat over and over. I remember that different states sometimes had their own. When I would dial, for example, a non-existent number in the 901 area code, there was a very 'southern' lady who gave the same message, but it was followed by 901-2-L (nan-o-one-two-ayl). I've now been inspired to try and dig out some of my old cassettes too. Evan, I've checked out a couple of your other videos and they are amazing. I don't have the technology background like you do, to know about crossbars and switches, etc... But it was always my dream as a young teen to work for the telephone company. Thank you for these wonderful memories.

[@evandoorbell4278]

If the "5168" you're talking about was during mid 1970 through about 1972, this is it exactly kzbin.info/www/bejne/eX-UdKiad9qNhJo At the end of THIS program you can hear how I was calling those same recordings in distant area codes kzbin.info/www/bejne/f2rcioRohN6Jnq8 And yes, I have several recordings of the exact Memphis lady (Nano one... Tuh-ee) you remember :-) PLEASE publish those cassettes you recorded. If the pressure pads have degraded, transfer the tapes into good cassette shells first. Make 22050 16 bit .wav files the MINIMUM quality you digitize at; They're OK to publish as 128 mp3's.

[@JVC516]

Hi Evan. That was exactly it. All of both Suffolk and Nassau counties were 516 at the time. All area codes had either 0 or 1 as the middle digit, and there was no need to dial "1" before the area code. I also remember anytime I had access to a payphone or almost any phone for that matter, (within most of New York), I'd dial "958" to get the electronic read-back of the phone number. That was always fun. It was a nifty sounding electronic device that had a click with each digit it gave. I'll be listening to all of your posts. These bring back some wonderful memories. Thanks again for sharing them.

[@cjaquilino]

@@JVC516 In the NYC area there was a "if you'd like to make a call please hang up..." recording that was used at least from maybe the late 80s to maybe mid 2000s. I can't find a recording of that. To me it sounded like a man in at least his 30s or 40s.

[@evandoorbell4278]

@@cjaquilino I don't have that recording on tape, and it MIGHT have been just some guy in the central office. However, see if it was THIS voice: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iaLdqZ1_g9iVnLM THAT is John Doyle of the Audichron company in Atlanta.

[@cjaquilino]

@@evandoorbell4278 Unfortunately, it was. It was definitely an adult man with a NYC area dialect, likely a white guy though he could be from any white ethnic background. I can’t remember well enough to pick out which in particular. I can’t even necessarily narrow it down by area, though I do live in Westchester. Shout out from Westchester.

[@b43xoit]

Interesting; thanks for the post and the underlying research.

[@leroyjones6958]

Then, for years after than conf was gone, 8286 rang the SSMB testboard. There was a gruff old testman named Yarborough. He always answered "SSMB Yarbro!"

[@SyncdAlien]

I am absolutely loving this! Thank you! You had an ARP Odyssey synthesizer? Whatever happened to that, still have it?

[@evandoorbell4278]

No sadly it got stolen in 1980.

[@collan5274]

Why doesn’t this have more views wtf

[@user-mj8nf2vp7q]

...Towards the end of the Southern cross-talk clip, it almost sounds as if I can hear nighttime cicadas in the background. Not unusual if recorded on a steamy, Southern night during early Summer to early Fall. 👍🏽💯😊

[@Lethaltail]

3:45 its quite funny knowing waaaay in advance, having listened to other pieces in the library, that this recording is actually of that test line that would do the off-hook/on-hook routine. Clever use of the old recordings, i've always liked that in these files.

[@evandoorbell4278]

VERY good! You recognized where it came from :-) In THIS presentation, I'm using composites, and I sometimes rearrange things to make it as concise and understandable as possible. The OTHER version of 052 is the accurate one.

[@adamv4951]

I remember a certain number we dialed with the last four digits of our phone number, hang up, and it would automatically ring back our number except no one was on the line. I remember when my brother and I caught onto this, we would "prank" my mom and she would answer with no one on the line. Pretty funny. I guess this was a code the service guys would use to test the line.

[@evandoorbell4278]

Yep, and that was one of the things that got me interested in phones. It WAS a test line.

[@gonzo_the_great1675]

Heard the speaking clock years ago, on Evan's phone trips site (on the 052 conf tapes). I had always assumed the sound of people laughing was in the background of one of the phreaks in the US, rather than crosstalk from Britain. As it seems to have more HF components than Derek or the clock.

[@evandoorbell4278]

Good point about the high frequency content vs the clock voice; now I'm going to have to listen to that again and see if my opinion changes as to where that came from.

[@evandoorbell4278]

In any case, international trunks had the exact same frequency range as domestic long distance; they just tended to be noisier, white noise-wise

[@judyjones5089]

Thank you so much! This is very accurate. The exception being that in real life, the pitch of the tones is down a half step. The recording has raised the pitch.

[@evandoorbell4278]

No ma'am. Everything is right on pitch, unless I made a stupid mistake. If there's a particular place you think is off, give me the time point and I'll double- check. Speed variations are always a thing with the old tapes, thus when I narrate a program I correct it, using a whole set of reference tones. Sometimes I have to use the background hum of the 60 Hertz power that got onto the tape, to get it right. There's an old myth that you can tune your instrument by the Bell System city and suburban dial tones because they're a B flat. In fact they vary because they're motor-generated. But the good news is you CAN tune your instrument by the top note of a North American modern dial tone, which is an A 440. The bottom note is very close to an F but not exactly.

[@judyjones5089]

@@evandoorbell4278 O I'm sure your work is stellar. I have perfect pitch, and I'm just remembering. I do the same things with older song recordings that are available now. Newer songs seem to be on the key I remember them to be, but that's just me. I love your channel. You were thirteen in 1970, and I graduated in 1971. Thanks so much for giving us all this rich memorabelia and hours of entertainment through your very hard work.

[@evandoorbell4278]

@@judyjones5089 Thanks so much! I DON'T have perfect pitch EXCEPT for the modern dial tone, but even THAT slips by me sometimes because over this lifetime I've heard so many off-frequency ones due to tape speed variations. Sadly, when I remember a song from the past, it invariably plays flat AND "in the cracks" in my head, usually about 2.3 semitones too low.

[@judyjones5089]

@@evandoorbell4278 I know, I understand. My husband also has perfect pitch, yet I second-guess myself sometimes, and have to ask him. I notice on newer compilations the pitch seems correct unless songs have been remastered, and that always seems to raise the pitch. Some of the tapes I have digitized of music, original recordings I made let me know that I'm pretty on. I love all your offerings, and you are so professional and articulate and come at explanations the way a good instructor would.

[@deathstrike]

Actually both of you are correct. The discrepancy of the recordings is not real world, it's a result of the compression algorithm KZbin uses when music and other media is uploaded to KZbin. If you compare an actual high quality digital sample say at 320k (CD quality) out of a CD player, digital player, or digital tape, you will hear it as close to the master recording as possible. So it will be "in tune" so to speak. But on KZbin especially, due to the compression needed to accommodate a very large variety of audio devices, it tends to playback an unmodified upload (no frequency or pitch adjustments or use of Audacity) at about 1/2 octave higher. So "slightly sharper" so a solid C would be expressed as C# on the octave scale. And all subsequent notes raised slightly to their upper tonal values. B flat becomes a B and so forth. Many people cannot detect this discrepancy due to many listening to music via KZbin and possibly not hearing a master or first generation recording. I've found the same effect is found in an analog cassette player with a gradually stretching belt. The music seems off because it is now playing slightly faster due to the belt tension being off. It also can occur when lower quality power is causing the motor to deviate beyond the 1 7/8 IPS (inches per second). Sorry if this was long, but in Evan's case the upload was at the proper speed and tonal quality. It's the upload that hacked it.

[@jgrysiak6566]

I just always thought towns that had #5 crossbar were the best! They had touchtone & pushbutton phones. My town was a step by step town that was installed in 1930. It was Very draconian switching & boring rotary dial phones, it was finally upgraded to 2BESS in 1980.

[@agy234]

Why did operators pick up when you dial an incorrect number?

[@evandoorbell4278]

In the 1970s operators answering nonworking numbers was so that the customer could be told the status of the number they were trying to reach, and given a new number if there is one.

[@robbybaker2332]

Fastinating i remember those older phones was fun to listen to background talk

[@altebander2767]

In very rare cases you could have crosstalk on digital circuits. Some years ago I ran some fax transmission tests between different carriers and at least one of the fax calls at night had audible voices in the background. We recorded that digitally on the lines going into the switch (it was SIP/RTP at that end) and we could hear fairly silent voices for about a second each. We made sure to check that nobody was in the room where the only analog part of the line was (a short cable between an ATA and a modem) so it must have been mixed in digitally somewhere. My guess is that there was some sort of faulty audio processing somewhere on a switch. Why they bothered processing the audio in an all digital G.711a based system is lost to me, but some companies apparently do filter audio when they don't transcode.

[@evandoorbell4278]

The general consensus seems to be that once there's multi-channel digital-to-analog conversion going on, you CAN get that effect due to a "ground loop" -type situation in the analog part of the equipment.

[@altebander2767]

@@evandoorbell4278 Yes, but we didn't have that here. There were no analog phone lines used for voice in the building. Everything going out was digital. Our guess was that somewhere in the network there was a defective DSP.

[@altebander2767]

If I may ask, that "Sprint" telephone, was that some kind of satellite phone that has to get by with 2400 bps or something? I mean that sounds terrible. Even terrestrial mobile telephony over GSM or LTE typically sound much better than that.

[@evandoorbell4278]

It was an iPhone using Sprint in 2019. Around 2016 they began using a much better CODEC, between Sprint phones anyway. But by 2019 it was back to sounding like that EVERY time, calling Sprint -to- Sprint using the Sprint network. It didn't improve until T-Mobile completely ended the Sprint network.

[@Caifo]

That European tones sound very similar to the tones we have in Mexico since the 90s, when the phone company -a state monopoly by then- was sold and the new management made a deal with France Telecom to modernize the network. In the 70s and 80s they were more like the American ones.

[@evandoorbell4278]

When I visited Mexico City and Guadalajara in 1974, the telephone network was very state of the art. Almost all of the switches were Erickson crossbar, and in those parts of Mexico, European tones were standard.

[@Caifo]

@@evandoorbell4278do you have any recording of that?

[@meamadam]

If I'm not corrected, while we Strowger switches, then panel switches, then number 1 crossbar, then number 5 crossbar, England used Strowger switches until digitization in the eighties, except for a brief exchange but it failed.

[@evandoorbell4278]

Basically that is correct, except that Strowger appeared somewhat late in the Bell system. In some cities, such as Atlanta, panels were actually replaced by Strowger. The U.K. built pretty much their entire network on "Senderized" Strowger, and crossbar played only a small role there.

[@RobertDunbar-st4qe]

The UK speaking clock that you hear is unusual. It did not have any of the voices used by the GPO/BT over the years (mainly female but one male - Brian Cubby) and it did not have the standard 'three pips' time signal. I think it may have been one set up by the BBC for use by staff out on outside broadcasts.

[@stvpls]

what a shame like 90% of those peices of engineering are now gone replaced by digital trash ones, would be a great project to bring a whole system back to life and put it in use a small town connecting every home in town for very little money, more like of a volounteer start up to bring back some old excanges

[@TechHowden]

More like 99.9%

[@stvpls]

@@TechHowden nah some stuff still lives on

[@davidk8893]

Beginning in the late 40's, AT&T/Bell built a giant system of towers spanning the entire country to transfer phone calls, television broadcasts, and other transmissions reliably and quickly. This was known as the AT&T Long Lines system. It operated over microwave frequencies, and were used up until the early 1990s. If you made a long distance phone call in the US from the 50s until the 80s, it would have gone through these towers. Since the phone transmission was routed through potentially dozens of microwave relay stations, it would give the phone call a certain sound to it; most likely the one that was recognized as the "long distance sound". The towers have been long since deactivated for microwave communications, but they can still be seen in many places across the U.S., and are distinctive due to the large, funky looking horn-shaped microwave waveguides on top of the towers. Many of the towers were built to withstand a nuclear blast as close as 5 miles away, and the equipment was contained in sturdy concrete buildings and shielded from EM radiation. Information on the AT&T Long Lines system: long-lines.net/ personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-lines-a-forgotten-system/ www.drgibson.com/towers/ Here is a map of all the AT&T Long Lines towers. Chances are, you live close to one, or you've seen one before and not known what they were: n3tuq.com/longlines/

[@mutestingray]

I lol'd at the crosstalk "dating service"

[@Zickcermacity]

47:07 - The very essence of "phone-phreaking"!

[@DevSodDribble]

Is it possible that the first online chatrooms were inspired by those party lines??

[@CJbrinkman602]

I’m sure they probably were, Steve Jobs used to Phone Phreak when he was in College same with Bill Gates, they probably knew about this stuff

[@shannonm75]

Those were the days. I remember the rotary phones. My grandparents had them in the 80s. My parents had them in the 70s. I was too little to remember. But I liked the rotary but it took forever to dial. At least we used 7 numbers back then and not 10. Later at home we had Trimline phones. I remember the prank calls back before caller ID. I made a few. Some kids called us for weeks and wouldn't say anything. Others said foul things. Once at the zoo there were payphones and my friend talked in one and I talked through another. There was an echo. What causes a reverb on a phone?

[@evandoorbell4278]

If you experience an echo effect, calling between two adjacent payphones, that probably means they were served by a digital switch that was adding a certain small amount of delay, such that what you heard through The air arrived faster at your ears than what was coming through the phone. Echo within the telephone network on a normal phone call is caused by a combination of reflection and time delay. That used to require a very long distance before it was even possible, say, a third of the way across the US. But thanks to modern digital technology time delays can occur calling the phone next to you.

[@MaximRecoil]

I was told about one of those busy signal crosstalk numbers in the early 1990s (in Central Maine) when I was 16 or 17, and I called it a few times. There were about four "regulars" on there who had been talking to each other for a long time on that number. They said they got used to the busy signal. I thought it was interesting (I'd never even heard of such a thing before), but the constant loud busy signal combined with the low volume of the voices ruined it for me. Speaking of busy signals, there's something I've wondered about since I was a kid and have never been able to find out. If you call someone and get a busy signal, and they happen to hang up while you're still hearing the busy signal, does the busy signal continue even though their line is no longer busy, or does it stop and then start ringing their line?

[@evandoorbell4278]

I used to wonder that myself when I was younger. No, the busy signal was final; No chance of getting through to the line if you waited long enough. The line was tested for busy/idle status only once, when you first made the call. In some private branch exchanges, a feature like that DID become available in the late 1970s, but you didn't get a busy signal. Instead you'd get a ring tone with a subtle tone at the end of each ring. In THAT case, if you waited until the party hung up, you WOULD get through. But since it sounded to most people like a regular unanswered ring, the feature ended up not being very useful.

[@excolso]

Fascinating stuff. Thanks! Some I already recalled, such as the strange and exotic (to me) aggressive metallic-sounding ringtones I would hear in some of Columbus' farther-out suburbs and nearby rural areas, plus other things I had forgotten about like the teenage faux "party lines." One thing I discovered is that if I would call one of those odd-tone suburbs and press the switch-hook "just right" as it rang, the ring would go silent and -- IIRC -- I could then dial just the last 4 digits to reach another number with the same prefix. Also, while my memory is fuzzy, I believe there was some switch-hook trick I could do with what were *supposed* to be unassisted direct-dial long-distance calls, resulting in "beep-beep" followed by an operator asking for number please. I believe there was another switch-hook-as-ringing trick that would get me the exotic-sounding "special operator." Come to think of it, maybe some of those switch-hook tricks may have been things I would do during the drunken-sounding "error tones"...or maybe a busy signal, or a circuits busy signal? I'm betting some of your other videos will get into such phenomena. Looking forward to watching regardless.

[@evandoorbell4278]

The ability to hang up for a short interval, and then redial the last four or five digits was called "choinking." There are many examples of it over the narrated tapes I've published. It also sounds like you discovered my trick to make the automatic number Identification fail. that is some thing I haven't discussed yet

[@Chad.Tyrone4UNow]

I love City Ring, City Busy and Crossbar 5 ring and busy tones.

[@YouB3anz]

pov: the algorithm did not bring you here. You looked up phone nostalgia and found this

[@samuelmartinez6344]

That's cool how you were able to utilize the sound quality of the old phone communication of the 60s! How did you do that? I wish I can try it too.

[@evandoorbell4278]

It isn't easy… I began with an actual 500 set powered by DC so the mouthpiece would work, rolled off the high frequencies, consistent with what an old wire line trunk was like in the old days, then added the resonance of an old wire line (that's the trickiest part), plus the background whines and tape noise from a 1970s recording.