Meat Plow wrote:
On Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:44:09 -0400, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

I could whistle at 2600hz and hang up the central opertator line. I
made a blue box for a friend but he got busted before he used it. He
was a greek with dual citizenship and had a girlfriend in Greece he
would call using a reel to reel tape with some prerecorded tones on it.
He got the idea from one of his greek buddies that was here visiting
that built a working blue box and recorded the tones and their
sequences on tape. The box was easy to build, all tin can 741 op amps
on a self etched PC board. Problem was tuning it, I was only 17 back
then and had no way to tune it. Said friend was set to take it to
school electronics class and tune it when the FBI hauled him off one
early morning in his boxer shorts He was deported back to Greece and
lost his US citizenship.


Even 'Dr. Johnny Fever' knew not to mess with the Phone Cops! ;-)

They found out in part by talking to his girlfriend. She explained that
he used a tape device. I stayed at his place the night before so i was
there at 6 am Sunday morning when they came a knockin on his door. I was
zipped up in a sleeping bag peering through an opening when he answered
the door (had a safety chain) opening it part way just enough for an arm
holding a gold badge to pop through I stayed in the bag while they
looked for a tape device which he didn't have there at the time. They
found a loop of tape on an Echoplex tape delay box for guitar that he had
and un-looped it with a pencil thinking they found the evidence They
asked him who was inside the sleeping bag and he said just a friend and
they never bothered me. He had hid the blue box pretty well and it wasn't
found because they found the tape quickly so they were satisfied they had
what they were looking for. When they left I dug out the blue box and
destroyed it. Since they really had no evidence of a device that could
make the calls but knowing the calls came from his number back when he
was living with his parents they could only deport him and revoke his
citizenship. He never went on trial for the calls. Just was given a plane
ticket and said see ya later. They probably made it impossible to get a
visa back into the country since I never saw him again. But he did call me
maybe 10 years later from Greece. He said he was in a friends recording
studio. That was in 1982.

that's amusing.

in the early 90s I recall red boxes still worked in some parts of Chicago.

You'd frequently get an operator who would ask something scripted like
"are you using an illegal dialing device?" and then they'd keep requesting
that you add quarter to the payphone.

They'd even ask you to "please wait by the phone" if you just kept jamming
on * and 6 or whatever the buttons were emulating a quarter.