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Where the time is just about 7 p.m., it's time for another exciting edition of Off the Hook.
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Off the Hook
Off the Hook
Very good evening to you. The program is Off the Hook.
Rob T. Firefly here with you in the studio, and I am joined by Alex.
Good evening, everybody.
And Jim is here.
Hello.
And on the phone, we're joined by Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Our colleagues, Emanuel and Kyle, are away on assignment, where we cannot get hold of them.
All attempts to do so are failing at this point.
So we will move on and keep trying to get hold of them and see what happens, because we do live radio here.
So, Alex, you've been away for a bit.
Yeah, I have, and I have to say it's fantastic to be back here.
It's great to see everybody's face, especially yours, Rob.
I wish Emanuel and Kyle were here, but hopefully they'll be joining us soon.
I think the last time that I was on Off the Hook, I was still in London, as a matter of fact,
and I just moved back, I guess, excuse me, about seven months ago back to New York, back to my old place.
And, you know, now that I essentially work for myself and I've started my own law firm,
I can finally tell people exactly what I do after all these years of working for other people.
When I was in London, I was information security counsel for a major luxury conglomerate
and then chief compliance officer of the same.
And now, having moved back to New York, I started my own firm called Blackstone Law Group
and a separate information security consultancy called Black Chambers.
And the way we operate is that we have injected legal privilege or the attorney-client privilege
into the process of information security.
So prior to this sort of innovation, if you had an information security consultancy come in
and document a bunch of things and document vulnerabilities during a security assessment,
all of that would have been discoverable by the government or a plaintiff.
And they operate only through my law firm now.
So the Black Chamber side works only through Blackstone, Blackstone Law Group.
And what we do is we wrap all of our findings and our analysis in the protection of legal privilege.
And that allows all the parties to be a lot more candid with each other and mitigates the risk
that anybody will ever get their hands on this very, very highly sensitive documentation.
So it's been very exciting to be back.
And I'm happy to announce that we received our notification from the Speaker Selection Committee
for the 11th HOPE that we will be speaking on two separate talks come July.
So that's very exciting.
If you want me to go into them, I will, Rob.
Perhaps, but for those unfamiliar, the 11th HOPE is our hacker conference here in Manhattan.
It happens every other year.
This is the other year, folks.
And we may have mentioned this once or twice on this program over the previous few months.
Haven't we, Bernie?
Absolutely.
We've been harping on it.
Well, not really harping, but sort of spreading the word about the 11th HOPE, doing this since 1994.
And it's truly a labor of love.
None of us make money on this, but it's a really exciting event to learn about all the stuff
you were afraid to ask or didn't know to ask.
And it's held right there in New York City.
Yeah.
And we've been going through so many awesome talk submissions.
And the submissions are now closed because we've got a great pool of things to choose from.
Some things have been announced as accepted already.
Other things are still in the process.
But I got to say, this is an exciting one.
Apart from yours, Alex, the other ones are good, too.
I don't mean it like that.
But, yeah, I think we have some really good things shaping up.
Our keynote, of course, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing.
And if you could go a little bit into, Alex, what you're going to discuss.
Sure.
Excuse me.
The first one that we're going to be discussing is reverse engineering, legal developments on reverse engineering.
Recently, I think it was May 26, actually, there was a federal law called the Defense of Trade Secrets Act that was passed.
And I will be speaking on this particular federal law and, in particular, the reverse engineering provision of the Defense of Trade Secrets Act with a colleague of mine whose name is Sebastian Holst.
And he's with a company called Preemptive Solution.
They work on a lot of source code obfuscation issues.
And under the DTSA, what they have carved out specifically under federal law is an allowance for reverse engineering of trade secrets.
So that under the definition of misappropriation is an exception.
And that exception is reverse engineering.
And this has got people all up in arms about what it means.
And there's been a new EU directive to harmonize the law with the United States that's recently come down the pipes.
And, you know, all of this is really questionable in terms of tying the right to reverse engineer to the law.
And what are the mechanisms that you can protect yourself from reverse engineering?
And what are the counterattacks to those protections and the counterattacks to those counterattacks?
So that's one talk that we will be engaged in.
And the other one has to do with the Panama Papers.
And my law firm and my information security consultancy has been involved since the outset of the Panama Papers in various aspects of investigating how this happened and who did it and why.
And I think this talk is going to be extremely, extremely interesting because we're going to be analyzing certain documents and certain systems that have hitherto been unannounced in the media.
And in particular, we'll be focusing on Melsack Fonseca, the law firm who was supposedly breached.
And it was their data supposedly from an email server, 2.6 terabytes of data supposedly residing on an email server.
So that's one thing that we are going to analyze and quite possibly debunk during our talk that was breached.
And Melsack Fonseca, what they did was where they were the law firm in Panama, but they had tentacles or maybe I should say offices all over the world.
And they created shell companies in tax havens.
And they were up to a lot of other very, very interesting things, which we will delve into in our talk.
And today, as reported by The Guardian, somebody from the Melsack Fonseca office in I believe it was Geneva was picked up by the authorities and held on suspicion that he may have had some kind of involvement with the breach.
And I believe the story is ongoing and facts are coming in slowly.
But this is something that we've always thought about as well and our talk will get into.
We have a lot of suspicions that this was an inside job and that this was quite possibly an IT person who became disillusioned with the practices of Melsack Fonseca.
We'll get into it in our talk.
I don't want to give away too much before people pay the price of admission, of course.
But it will be very interesting and we're going to be following this story very closely.
Indeed. So this story, which came out in The Guardian today, just mentions a lot of the uncertainty that's surrounding the reasons for the arrest.
Apparently they're being kind of cagey about that.
Yes, no question.
And I think that's deliberate.
And in Switzerland, I had worked quite a bit in Geneva as well.
Things are really on the rails there.
They like to do everything by the books.
They like to have the trains run exactly on time.
And the other thing to remember about Switzerland is this is a country that is very – well, to its citizens and to its governmental officials and especially its banking institutions, secrecy and nondisclosure are kind of part and parcel of the culture.
So details coming out from the government may be slow.
And I think we have to deal with that.
But this person apparently was – well, ICIJ was the organization to which the 2.6 terabytes of data were leaked by the whistleblower.
And apparently ICIJ and the German paper that was involved in this, whose name I will not even try to attempt to butcher at this moment because I don't have the phonetic pronunciation in front of me, have claimed that they highly doubt that the person who was held in Geneva was in fact the whistleblower.
Well, this is definitely something we'll be keeping a close eye on and, of course, talking about at Hope.
We have some other special guests lined up for later in the program.
But before we do that, Bernie, is there anything you want to tell us about them?
About our guests tonight?
Yes.
Yeah, well, last summer some of our listeners may remember I was camping in Maine.
And I was driving up some lonely highway and I saw a barn off to the side of the road that said Telephone Museum.
And I had to jam on my brakes and do a quick speed U-turn and go back and check out this Telephone Museum, which is really amazing.
It's in Ellsworth, Maine, middle of nowhere.
But it's this huge barn and associated buildings with entire central office telephone exchanges and all kinds of antique stuff going back to step-by-step, you know, Stryber switches and antique phones.
And it's an amazing place.
But they're just rolling out a new display, a new exhibit, called The First Phone Freaks.
The First Hackers, Phone Freaks vs. Ma Bell, 1955-1975.
And we have Phil Lapsley, who's written a book, Exploding the Phone.
He's been a speaker at Hope about phone freaking.
And we have several other gentlemen.
I'll introduce them when they come on the air here.
But if you want, I can put you on hold and bring them.
I'm going to call into a conference bridge where they're waiting for us live from the Telephone Museum.
Is that OK?
That's perfectly fine.
I'll do that right now.
Put us on hold.
You get to have that power over us this time.
Don't let it go to your head.
All right.
Hold on.
All right.
So you do that.
And while you're finagling that, there's a couple other things going on this week.
There was, of course, the terrible recent events in Orlando, which if you've been listening to this station, you've been hearing some of our other coverage of this here at WBAI.
But this kind of ties in with something else we were talking about recently about people getting their Twitters hacked, their social media presences hijacked by activists and those seeking all sorts of expression.
And in response to the events in Orlando, apparently this is a story on Newsweek, hackers have hijacked ISIS Twitter accounts.
And when they gained access to these accounts, they then proceeded to fill them with admissions of homosexuality, gay porn, and things of that sort.
I actually tried to send this story to our internal email list where we discuss the stories of the week and got notes back from a couple of people's workplace emails that such a thing was not accepted because of the subject line.
But, yeah, so that's been going on.
And, yeah, it hardly seems like anything in comparison to the scope of the events that have happened.
But at the same time, it's a little strike back from those who have certain skills and decide to put them to use in this way.
Hey, Rob?
Yes, Bernie.
I have our guests on the line right now.
Our guests are here. Excellent.
Yes.
Before we get into that, we have been trying to get hold of Emmanuel and Kyle in parts unknown, but those efforts have failed.
But I do have their greetings to convey to our listeners, and I'm sure we'll be hearing all about their adventures on the next installment of this program.
So moving on, Bernie, who have we got?
We have Martin Harris.
He's the board president of the Telephone Museum in Ellsworth, Maine.
He also works at Princeton University.
We have Charlie Dunn.
He's one of the museum's founders.
We have Chad Perkins.
He's a board member and a board clerk.
And we have Steve Pater, a board member.
And last but not least, we have Phil Lapsley, a frequent HOPE speaker and author of the recent amazing book, Exploding the Phones, all about phone freaks.
And, Martin, I understand there's a new exhibit being rolled out this week at the Telephone Museum, isn't there?
Yes, there is.
The exhibit is called The First Hackers, and it traces some of the history of the original phone freaks who started, I guess, in the late 50s or early 60s.
And we have some exhibits that we've put together to show some of the steps through the history of what happened.
In fact, I'm going to ask Steve Pater to talk a little bit about that, because he's been the one that's been designing and coordinating everything.
So, Steve, if you could maybe say a little bit about what we are showing here.
Well, we attempt in our new exhibit to tell the story of a group of mostly young, curious, intelligent, mostly male people, some of whom were blind,
who set out to explore the highways and byways of the world's largest machine, the Bell Systems Long Distance Network.
The tale we tell explains how it came to pass that Bob Bell's engineers made their task actually relatively easy to do.
So in our exhibit, the stations are laid out somewhat chronologically.
So we take visitors through the early days of electronic communications, and then a segue to early automatic switching equipment,
and arrive at the point where Bell's engineers made a very failed choice that provided the keys that opened the doors for the hackers.
So in our exhibit, we cover blue boxes, 2600 tricks, loop arounds, and of course, we feature some of the prominent hackers and their achievements.
And we have a number of interactive stations where visitors can explore firsthand blue boxing, loop arounds, and things you can do with 2600.
Wow, so this is not just a telephone museum, this is actually a phone freaking museum now, is that right?
Well, it is as far as our special event is concerned, yes.
Okay.
That's true.
That's amazing to me. Is it possible to actually play with some blue boxes?
We have a little demonstration. It's not exactly the same stuff that existed back in the day, but a pretty good simulation.
We allow people to try out and see what they can do, basically. If you have one, bring it in play. Show us what you can do.
Excellent. We'll have to blow the dust off our old phone freaking devices.
Yeah, I think it would be great to hear a 2600 cycle tone.
Excellent. I'm sorry, go ahead, Bernie.
Phil, I understand you're in California right now, but you're heading out to Ellsworth, Maine to the Telephone Museum tomorrow morning, right?
To be there for the unveiling of this new exhibit there?
Yeah, that's exactly right, Bernie. I'm actually hopping on a red-eye in a few hours, and I'll be flying out and getting in tomorrow morning.
And I'm really looking forward to the opening of this exhibit. It sounds really cool.
A few minutes ago, before we got on the radio, I was getting to hear some of the stuff that these guys have planned, and it's just amazing.
I mean, this is going to be a cool exhibit.
Phil, what was your role in making this exhibit happen?
Well, like the best things in life, I didn't have to do very much. They did all the work.
Steve contacted me a little bit out of the blue and said, hey, we want to do this exhibit, and could I help out a little bit?
Mostly, I ended up just contributing a few things, a few artifacts that I had, some old memos.
I believe I sent them a blue box and a few other things.
And so I contributed a few things to the exhibit, but again, it's really all their work.
Excellent, excellent.
And, Rob, I think we have some, they're going to do some live demonstrations of some things from the Telephone Museum this evening,
with actual sounds from mechanical switches, electromechanical switches, step-by-step switches, crossbar number three, number five crossbars, and some blue box sounds.
Do we want to move ahead with that now, or do we have any more questions from you guys?
I've got a quick question. Bernie, you were a little cryptic with the location of Ellsworth,
so I'm wondering if they could give us a bit more of a read on exactly where that is in Maine.
Is it close to Portland? Is it close to Bangor? We know it's somewhere in the vast range of the 207, right?
Yes, we are in the vast range of 207. Yeah, we are located in Ellsworth, Maine.
We are sort of midway between Bar Harbor and Bangor, actually, and it's a pretty big tourist area.
A lot of people come up to go to Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island and that area.
But it's quite a way up in Maine, sadly, but we have a really great location here.
We have a good facility and plenty of space, and we think it's a good place to be.
We are conveniently located right off 1A, which is the main road between Bangor and Bar Harbor.
Okay, so if we can move on to hearing some of these cool sounds you've got for us,
and then after that we'll talk a little bit about what we've heard.
Sure. So we're all kind of standing around now in one of the aisles of our No. 5 crossbar system.
So the No. 5 crossbar was designed at Bell Labs right after the Second World War,
and it was designed basically to meet the needs of the growing suburban community.
The veterans came back from war, they all settled down in the suburbs,
and the Bell system needed a switching system that could accommodate this rapidly growing population.
And because of that, the No. 5 crossbar has a number of firsts.
In particular, it was the first system that could really by itself do automated billing of toll calls,
so you didn't need an operator anymore.
In fact, the first installation of that was in 1951 in New Jersey,
where they allowed people to dial really across the country, dial themselves, without having to go to an operator.
And before we hear this, how would you describe where you are in this system
for those who have never seen anything like it or have no idea what it looks like?
So I'm surrounded by I think about 10...
11 foot 6.
Yeah, 11 foot 6 base equipment. It's really tall.
And each of those bays is really full of relays and crossbar switches.
I guess it's kind of hard to describe if you've never seen anything like that,
but you can go online and look for pictures of crossbar switches.
And if you search No. 5 crossbar, there's certainly some pictures on the web that you can look at.
We're sort of right in the middle of it here,
and the piece of equipment that's directly in front of us is called the marker.
And the reason it's called the marker is kind of historical,
but really what it is is the brains of the system.
If you like, it's like a relay-based computer because it controls the setup of all the calls.
And it's got a lot of relays in it, so it makes a lot of noise when it operates,
and hopefully we'll be able to demonstrate that in a minute.
Please do.
But as I say, it's really the brains of the thing.
It has its fingers around all the other pieces of equipment in the system, and it controls them.
So whenever you make a call, that's the thing that's actually doing the hard work
and figuring out how to route your call.
Excellent.
Well, should we make a call now and see how it works? Hear how it works?
So what I'm going to do, I'm going to make a local call to another phone that's connected to the same switch.
And what you'll hear first of all is you'll hear some pulsing.
The phone I'm using is actually a dial-based bucket plugged into a test line here.
And as I dial the call, you'll hear, hopefully you'll hear,
because Charlie is doing an absolutely stalwart job of holding the speakerphone right up to the relays.
So you'll hear the relays clatter as I dial the call.
And then after I dial the very last digit, there'll be a big sort of wall of noise,
and that's going to be the relays of the marker that are actually switching the call through.
And we have a phone that's at the other end of the building,
which you may or may not hear ringing after the call is set up.
So here we go. I'm going to start dialing right now.
I heard ringing.
Yep, that was the, I'll release the call now, but that was the ringback from the phone that we just called.
I hope that everybody managed to hear the noises okay, and that it sounded good.
I know we tried it for Phil earlier and it sounded pretty good, so hopefully it came through okay over the radio.
It came through pretty good.
We heard, I think we heard clicks that are consistent with pulse dialing. Is that correct?
You would?
So the next little demonstration we're going to do is we're going to make a call from our number 5 crossbar to our number 3 crossbar switch.
And because these are both crossbar systems, we can set up an MS trunk to do that.
And I have a monitor plugged into the trunk here, so hopefully you will hear the MS tones that are going by.
It's not going to be very long because this is a call that terminates in our number 3 crossbar,
so only four digits need to be sent, but hopefully you'll get to hear it.
So what's going to happen is I'm going to go off hook again.
I will dial the number, and then you may hear some patters of the marker operating,
and then there will be some MS tones coming over that hopefully will make it over the radio.
So here we go. Let's try this.
Okay, so what you heard there was the MS being sent from the 5 crossbar to the 3 crossbar.
Then shortly after that, you heard the phone ringing.
That's the phone on our 3 crossbar that we made the call to, and hopefully that came through okay.
What you didn't hear there is my ear-to-ear smile, because it's really quite nice hearing MS tones.
I didn't think I was ever going to hear those again actually used in a real switching system in my lifetime.
That's awesome.
Absolutely.
I'm half expecting Emanuel to pick up the phone when it's ringing.
So this is, I think, accurately described as when you made phone calls back when these systems were derogare.
This is what was going on at the telephone company's facilities that would allow your call to go through.
I understand you have an old step-by-step demonstration set up there too, doesn't it?
Yeah, so what we're going to do is we're going to put this speakerphone on mute in just a second,
and maybe you can chat with Phil for a bit.
We have to move it over to the other side of our exhibit area,
and then we'll come back on again and we'll make some calls on the step-by-step.
Sure thing.
Phil, have you been to the Telephone Museum before?
I have not, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Because I think it's funny, it's a little bit of a misnomer, right?
Because it's not just the Telephone Museum, it's the Telephone Switching Museum,
and that, I think, is just what's so amazingly cool about it,
is the idea that you actually get to see not just a bunch of phones on static display,
but you actually get to see the switching equipment that made them ring and allowed you to talk on them.
Well, I think I joked with Chad when I was out there last summer that they could call it the Telephony Museum,
but then people might see it as a phony museum.
Yes, indeed.
But it is indeed a telephony museum.
Now, Phil, our listeners might know you as the writer of Exploding the Phone,
a fantastic book on the history of phone phreaking.
Did that predate or prompt your interest in the hardware end of it?
You're saying, did the book cause the interest in the hardware?
Yes, or were you already into it?
Oh, no, no, definitely.
I mean, I'm an electrical engineer by training,
and I've been playing with phones since I was about probably eight or nine years old.
So this is something I've been interested in for quite a while.
Excellent.
So when these guys came up with their Telephony Museum,
or their Telephone Switching Museum, it was right up your alley.
Absolutely.
Yes, and I think, again, the ability to actually take a blue box
and actually play with it on the actual switching equipment that it was originally used on,
I think is just such an awesome idea.
It really should make everything come alive.
Indeed, and I think even just these sounds on the radio are making it come alive
in ways that we haven't managed yet.
Alex?
Yes, I have a – oh, very good, very good.
I was just about to say, gents, I have a – I'm so fascinated by this.
I have very, very fond memories of being a young teenager
and staring in the windows of the Ronkonkoma 5 ESS switching station
with some friends and now colleagues these days
and just trying to get a glimpse of what was going on inside.
I'm so fascinated.
I can't wait to get up to Maine and visit.
Absolutely.
Where can one find more information on the Telephone Museum if one were interested?
Well, you can certainly visit us at our website,
or you could – people can also call us.
We have a number that we answer when we're here.
So it's the TelephoneMuseum.org, right?
That's very simple.
All our contact information is on the website.
TelephoneMuseum.org, excellent.
And it's on Facebook, too.
I have a quick question for – I'll put this to Charlie as one of the founders.
How did this whole thing get started?
Well, I'm one of these people that was interested in phones when I was a kid, too,
taking them apart, following the phone men around whenever they appeared,
looking in the windows of the central office just like you guys.
And then – but I was in high school actually going into central offices.
And I guess it came to, you know, it came to, like, the late 70s,
and they were going to break up the bell system, right?
We all kind of knew that was going to happen.
So just really cool equipment.
That's the only way I can describe it.
I always just liked the equipment and the sounds and everything about it,
the way it was made, the way it looked.
We knew it was all going to go away pretty fast.
And three of us actually said, we've got to do something to try and save some of it.
And you know how immense this stuff is and how much of it there was.
So that's how the museum got started.
We started in the Boston area.
I met the owner of this piece of property.
That's Charles Galley.
He's not here with us tonight.
And he said, well, I've got all this land.
I've got a building.
Why don't we have the museum there?
And that's how it happened.
And we started collecting, switching from New England tell at the time,
independence, and so we're here.
Excellent.
There's a familiar sound.
That's a real phone call.
So I just wanted to remind our listeners,
the web URL is thetelephonemuseum.org.
Thetelephonemuseum.org.
And what is your telephone number up there at The Telephone Museum?
207-667-9491.
Okay.
That's great.
Our listeners might be calling.
I hope they don't call during the show.
I think one of them just did, actually.
Oh, okay.
Always a problem putting phone numbers out over the air.
Well, they've got to hear their call ring.
So what next do we have to listen to?
Well, we've got a step-by-step system here.
My cell phone is now ringing.
This is live radio, folks.
Yes, it is.
You know we love it.
So, yeah, we have a step-by-step system here.
It's actually a Western Electric 740 PBX,
and it's a small system, just two digits that we have to dial.
But I'm going to go pick up a phone,
and you'll hear some noise while the phone is connected to a switching equipment.
And then I'm going to dial some numbers,
and then you should hear another phone ring.
So let's try that right now.
Hopefully that came through okay.
Was that clear to everybody that's on the call here?
We couldn't hear it really well, but maybe we got the gist of it.
Yeah, unfortunately this is not a very large system that we have here.
It's the most convenient one to demonstrate on the speakerphone right now.
But when you're up there in person, it's loud and clear.
Oh, most definitely, yes.
And not only that, of course, but you can see everything actually happening.
You can actually watch the movement as well as hear it.
Absolutely, and it's probably still very large
in the scheme of crossbar systems that are currently running.
So you have an ANAC system up there, don't you?
Yes, we do.
And that's connected to the number three crossbar?
Yeah, we're going to go into the number three now.
We're going to mute the phone just in case we trip,
but you want to hear any prohibitive words.
Absolutely.
So who knows what crossbar means,
what crossbar refers to in the context of a crossbar system?
Well, I mean, I know what a crossbar switch looks like.
I've physically touched them,
and I actually used to have a piece of a crossbar switch years ago.
But it's basically a bunch of fine wires that are unlike a...
I can't really describe the electromechanical arrangement,
but it's a bunch of horizontal wires and then a bunch of vertical wires
that lift up and down and touch against the horizontal wires.
And it's basically, instead of relays,
it's a more compact way of doing switching than a whole bunch of big relays.
The key being that it is an electromechanical system
for those who might not be familiar with the distinction.
That means instead of printed circuit boards
and transistors and solid-state stuff,
there are actually things moving and touching wires to one another
to make all this happen.
Hey, they're back in the number three crossbar.
We are in number three.
Can you hear the interrupters going ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk?
That's like the drum guys keeping the beat.
Oh, yeah.
So we're going to try and make a call into our ANAC machine.
ANAC, A-N-A-C, stands for Automatic Number Announcing Circuit.
And it's a device that the technicians would use
to figure out what telephone number was on a particular line.
And they would dial a code,
and the machine would read back the number
that was associated with that telephone line.
And so, let's go off hook and dial the number.
This is Ray on the test stand.
Three, two, seven, nine, nine, eight, five.
What you actually heard there was the crossbar system
communicating with our ANAC machine by MF.
So that was that very long MF string that you heard there.
And the ANAC machine would take the MF,
which contains the number that you're calling from,
and turn it into a speech, into a voice.
Now, was that a digitally stored voice file?
Or how was that played?
Yeah, it's a digital voice.
I think it's a unit with a microprocessor.
And the different numbers are stored in digital format,
and it converts them back into analog
and sends them out over the telephone line.
And the microprocessor...
But there was ANAC before microprocessors.
There was ANAC, wasn't there?
How did that work?
Yeah, there was an early version of it
that used rotating drums of film.
The light shone through,
and each cell picked up each digit.
And then later on, there's ones with magnetic drums.
So we have the kind of modern, small, easy-to-install ones,
instead of the one that takes up 6 feet of height and 2 feet wide.
I did actually see one of the older ones at the weekend
visited somebody after the telephone show,
and he has one of those in his basement.
So it's always fun.
So, gentlemen, would this be the precursor to...
In the 9X and New York telephone days,
you would pick up the phone and dial 958,
and it would spit back the number for you.
That's exactly what it is, yes.
That's exactly the machine it is.
Does that actually still work on a landline?
I haven't tried that in years.
I don't know.
It works where I live.
It does.
They keep changing the codes around
because they don't want the rest of us using the codes.
As you know, it's no secret.
Oh, absolutely.
And can I ask you a question?
The number that the ANAX spit back was a 9985,
which sounds to me like it might be a telco phone number
because 99XX.
Internal phone number.
Ah, so that's what it is.
Gotcha.
It's a test line, right.
Excellent.
Listening to all this from our off-the-hook studio audience,
Jim just held up a sign saying road trip,
which I think we all agree heartily.
No question.
So you're going to make a local call now on the number 3 crossbar?
Yeah, we're going to go down into the midst of the markers.
They're not as big and impressive as the markers on number 5.
They're only about four feet high each,
but there's two of them,
and I'm going to go right into the middle of them.
And then we're going to do a call.
You'll hear one of the MF senders, actually,
or DP sender.
We'll claim that in a minute.
Oh, yeah.
So what you heard there was we made a call from our number 3 crossbar
out to one of the other switches we have here on the property.
That particular switch, it's called a CX100,
and it's just got relays.
There are no two motion selectors.
There's no crossbar switches.
Everything on that system is done by relays.
There's actually a very interesting story connected with that switch,
which I'll, at least for now, skip over.
But that particular machine only accepts dial pulses.
So the number 3 crossbar has to generate dial pulses to send calls there.
And what you heard at one point during the call,
the sort of the raffling is the best way I can describe it,
was the dial pulse sender dialing the number into the French for a CO there,
for the number we were trying to reach.
It sounded to me like there was a train and a centripede
and then a cricket, actually.
Yeah.
Excellent.
These are sounds from telephone history being resurrected
and shared with our radio audience, and I'm really digging this.
I'm having a lot of fun visually imagining all the physical gyrations
that you gentlemen up there in Maine had to do with, like,
bringing telephones around and holding the speakerphone up in the air,
attach these sounds so they can go out over the air
from atop the Empire State Building to the listeners of WBAI.
I really want to express our thanks for you doing that.
We'd like you to stay on the phone.
Maybe we can take some listener calls.
But before we do, I know this is a labor of love there,
and it's pretty much all volunteers.
How do you keep this thing running?
Do you take donations?
And if somebody wanted to help keep this museum alive,
how could they donate money?
Well, that's a very welcome topic that you just brought up.
Thank you very much.
Yes, we are an all-volunteer organization,
and it does cost a bit every year to operate,
to replace everything from electricity to heat
and keeping the garage cocked and all of those sorts of things.
And then, of course, we do have educational outreach,
and we want to keep creating interesting exhibits.
So there's always the need for donations, which we gladly accept.
So if you would like to do that, you have several choices.
Again, you can go to our website, thetelephonemuseum.org,
and on that website you will see a choice called Join and Support,
and there is a form there that you can fill out.
You are also very welcome to reach us by telephone or e-mail,
and if you wish to call, you may reach our event contact,
and that number is 978-973-0356, 978-973-0356,
or you can e-mail your willingness to donate,
and we'll be very happy and very, very efficient at getting back to you.
If you wish to reach us by e-mail,
ttmlikemary.switchboard at gmail.com.
That's ttm.switchboard at gmail.com.
And, again, thanks for asking, guys.
This is a 501c3 charitable organization,
so all donations are tax-deductible, right?
That's correct. We are 501c3, yep.
And that e-mail address was tpm, as in the phone museum?
The telephone museum, yep.
Oh, ttm.
tpm.switchboard at gmail.com.
ttm, as in the telephone museum, .switchboard at gmail.com.
That's right.
Great.
Excellent.
Hey, Rob, do we have time to take any listener calls about this stuff?
We maybe have time to take a couple of quick calls.
If you want to get your calls in very quickly,
the number to reach us on air, 1718-780-8888.
And you can speak with our guests,
speak with us about things we've been talking about on today's program.
While we wait for those of us to come in,
yes, the telephone museum.
And how might folks arrange visits to the facility?
So, if you'd like to visit,
probably the best thing to do is to get on the website,
all the directions and the information you can find there.
We are normally open in the summer on Saturday afternoons,
but if that's not convenient for you, then please give us a call,
and hopefully we can arrange an alternative.
Okay, great.
We are always open to that.
All right.
Our telephone equipment here is starting to light up,
so let's see who is out there tonight.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi.
I have to echo the sentiment, I think, of Bernie S.,
if not it was somebody else there,
about what a pleasure it was to hear those internal telephone company tones.
It was actually very nostalgic would be the only word.
I have a question.
Calling from Woodstock,
but I grew up in suburban New York in the early 70s,
and one of the telephone circuits that was very beloved by a lot of us
was Crossbar 5,
and I'm hearing the people from the museum talk about Number 5 Crossbar
as an earlier system,
but this was a very nice touch-tone system
that seemed to be dedicated to getting the call through
and getting it clearly without all of the add-ons like call waiting
or anything that interfered,
and it was very nice to play with with either a black box or a blue box,
and I'm wondering if that is the same system that your guest is talking about.
Yes, it's exactly the same.
Some people call it Number 5 Crossbar or Number 5 or 5 Crossbar,
but it's all the same thing,
and we have one of the only two that we know of that are remaining working.
Oh, that's beautiful.
I thought there was a system that predated Crossbar 5 called Crossbar 1,
and you mentioned three,
but I'm wondering if you know or have any of the old Crossbar 1 equipment.
No, we don't.
Crossbar 1 was an AORI.
It was an earlier system,
and it's quite a different design,
and the Number 3 Crossbar is really a little brother of the 5 Crossbar.
The designs are quite similar.
It's a very small system.
It was only good for up to, I think, about 1,200 lines.
It was supposed to be for rural locations
where they wanted some of the features they could provide with a Crossbar system
such as automatic toll billing and the like.
It was quite a belated system.
The Number 3 Crossbar, I think, is from the early 70s.
There were only about 25 of them produced.
It was kind of the last gasp, if you like, for Crossbar
because after that they came out with some of the small ESS systems.
I just wanted to point out that the caller,
I recognize the voice of Randy Steele from Woodstock 104,
and Randy is kind enough to simulcast this show off the hook every week
on Woodstock 104 in Woodstock, New York.
So listeners up in Woodstock are hearing this live on the radio too.
Oh, it's not any sort of kindness.
I love the show.
Thank you, Randy.
This was definitely a trip into the good old days for me,
and thank you very much.
Excellent.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much for your call.
Let's see if we can squeeze another in in the limited time we have left.
Let's see who else is out there.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
What a great show.
Thanks for having them on.
Thank you.
I'm heading up to Maine for a couple of weeks, so I will be there.
I have my original blue box that I built in 1968.
I have it somewhere still, so I will take that with me and play with that.
I go up there, and I have a box of Stoker gears,
probably six or seven of them, brand new, in the box with the wrapping,
and I will be happy to donate those as well.
Excellent.
Could you describe what those are for those unfamiliar?
I'm sorry?
Could you describe what those are for those who don't know?
Sure.
A Stoker gear was used in a step office,
and it was developed by this guy named Robert Stoker,
and it is an electromechanical device that dials pulse switch.
This thing would actually click the digits, so if it was a nine,
it would click nine clicks and then swing back,
and it would go to the next number, and it would click that number
and then swing back.
He was an undertaker, wasn't he?
I believe he was, as a matter of fact.
He did that because he was losing business.
He was a ticker.
He was losing business when he discovered that the local telephone operator
was related to the other undertaker in town,
and of course you couldn't tell how that was all going.
I'm not sure I knew all that.
He had a lot of time on his hands and realized that the solution
was not honest operators, but the real solution was no operators,
and he set out to make that possible.
Wow.
Fantastic.
Well, we look forward to you visiting, and thank you in advance
for the donation.
It sounds very interesting.
Absolutely.
If you don't have any, I'll bring a couple up and try to loose on you.
It'll be fun.
So I'll see you in the next couple of Saturdays as I head up to Maine
for my band and to go see this amazing telephone company.
I can't wait.
I've been playing with stuff like that.
Give us a call, Seth, just to make sure that we've got somebody to be there,
just in case.
Yeah.
Well, you said Saturday.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Well, thank you very much for that phone call,
which I believe will have to be our last as we're just about out of time.
But one last time, send us email, oth at 2600.com.
Go to hope.net to get the info on what's going on with our Hope Conference,
which is in around five weeks.
Five weeks.
Insanely enough, it's all happening again.
Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown Manhattan.
Hope.net, hopeconf on Twitter.
And, yes, for Off the Hook, this is Rob T. Firefly.
Thank you very much to our guests from the Telephone Museum.
Thank you to Bernie S. for finagling all that.
And we will leave you with this.
Have a very good night.
Stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show.
Good night.