The Early Phreak Days
by Jim Wood

   When I decided to get married back in 1962, I traded my DJ and broadcasting
odd jobs for one at the phone company; employment which, at the time, was
ultimately secure though my take-home pay was about $300 a month.

   Assigned to the Palo Alto, California central office as a Toll
Transmissionman, my duties included maintenance of toll traffic circuits and
related short-haul N and ON carrier equipment. Circuit testing was initiated
at a black bakelite Type 17B Toll Testboard. A field of several hundred jacks
gave access to as many inter-office trunks, many to the San Jose 4A and
Oakland 4M 4-wire switching centers.

   Though it was strictly forbidden, one could easily and safely "deadhead"
toll calls for one's self, family, or friends from the testboard. Around
Christmastime our office could easily have been confused with the Operator room
on the floor below.

   The 17B testboard had a 0-9, DTMF keypad arranged in two rows of 5 buttons
wired to the central office "multifreq" supply. A rack of vacuum tube L/C
oscillators comprised the MF supply and was buried somewhere in the bowels of
the building.

   Long days with too much (mostly union) staff and not enough to do
precipitated a lot of screwing around on the job. Some of these guys would
just daydream out the windows, others would hassle and torment the Operators
downstairs. One favorite trick was to sneak into the access space behind the
bank of 3C switchboards and push the cords slowly up towards the Operators.
The screams and commotion caused by a tip, ring, and sleeve "snake" was worth
the risk of getting chewed out by the old battleaxe who ran the place. Myself,
I just played with the Bell System; never with any intent to defraud, merely
to increase my understanding of how the whole thing worked.

   It was a singularly dull day that I hit on the idea of "deadheading" calls
through one of the local subscriber loop jacks which rang into the testboard.
Sure enough, I could rotary-dial through the step office to Sacramento (the
shortest hop on L carrier with inband signalling), "dump" the call in
Sacramento with a blast of 2600 from the 19c oscillator mounted overhead, then
multifreq out of Sacramento anywhere I wanted to go. Wow! I could hardly wait
to demonstrate this potential source of lost revenues to my first-line
supervisor. Both he and his boss were mildly impressed, but assigned minimal
importance to the event, since, in their words, "no one has a multifreq supply
at home."

   Ma Bell invented the transistor but was among the last to put it into
service. One of the few places a transistor was used in our office
was in the alarm circuit of the ON carrier system. The 13H was a wretched
little "top hat" PNP with just enough beta to work in a bridged-T oscillator
configuration. A half-dozen of these, some Olson Radio pushbuttons, and a 
handful of resistors and caps made a dandy MF supply.

   The next demonstration was from the Chief's own desk and did finally raise
some concern. I was asked to "donate" the box and told to keep the findings
strictly to myself. I have done so for 20 years now.

2600 Magazine, Volume 2, Number 11, November 1985