Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
by Phil Lapsley
First Posted Sept 2018
I’m really not a tech kid so much as I enjoy tech culture. It’s one of the few parts of current society where, simply by virtue of when I was born, I can see the seams that hold things together. There’s no mysticism with the internet, or online networking, or computer components: I saw the world shape around them. I can see the impression they left on culture. I can see that contours.
It’s not like the telephone. I cannot build a world without the telephone.
If you are my age, pretend the phone did not exist.
If you cannot quite grasp that world—congratulations. Now you know how anyone under thirty feels about the internet.
A coworker asked, “Who’s ‘Ma Bell?’” the day before I returned Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell to the library. I told her—somehow eschewing the pat and self-deprecating “...and then I turned into old dust” we of middle age must utter to ward off admission of actual decrepitude—about how the phone company used to be a governmentally approved near-monopoly. And unless you conflate surviving the relentless march of time with purposeful knowledge acquisition, there is no reason to shame a person whose youth precludes anything but a cellphone as their sole touchstone in the world of the telephonic communication.
This hypothetical youngster is, however, not likely to search their local library—as I did—for books about blue boxing. Exploding does seem to be the only non-fiction book on the subject, which is fine because it is an excellent one. It will answer all your blue box questions, though it didn’t answer the root: Are blue boxes common knowledge or esoterica?
I am an aberration; I worked in the telecom department of Columbia Business School for a bit right around when I started using goodreads, so the fundamentals of contemporary telecommunications are seared into my brain. If you haven’t heard about Captain Crunch or Oaf Tobar or Berkeley Blue, though, how could you know there is a story to even find? What level of interest in technology do you need for this to be appealing? Ditto, culture. And history. Mayhaps a mélange of all three is the requisite? I simply don’t know.
I wasn’t alive during the heyday of phone phreaking, but I grew up with the old black rotary dialer—the world of landlines and busy signals isn’t foreign to me like it is for the aforementioned coworker born in the mid-to-late 90s. I can picture a world without connectivity—as foreign as that feels now—and how much work teenagers were willing to do to chase away their loneliness:
Certain telephone exchanges in some areas of the country, notably Los Angeles and San Jose in California, had busy signals that were shared among all callers. An example was San Jose’s 291 exchange in the 408 area code. If you and I both happened to call busy numbers in 408-291 we would be connected, faintly, over the busy signal—along with anyone else who happened to have called a busy number at that moment. If we shouted we could hear each other. Of course, we’d be constantly annoyed by the baaa...baaa...baaa of the busy signal. And that busy signal was loud; our voices would be in the background to the busy signal in the foreground. “It was an insane way to try to communicate,” recalls Jim Fettgather…
There are so many things to learn in this book, from the fundamentals of multifrequency harmonics to the advent of transistors and how they altered so many industries. You see modernity collapse the barrier of distance through communication technologies, and then watch as clever folks smash that magical infrastructure into even more amazing bits.
Which brings us to the most important part: Exploding is fun. These are smart people outwitting a monolithic system. It’s cool and the writing makes sure you know exactly how cool by never losing irreverence even when things get heavy:
And FBI memo [indicated]: “As a source of income, the underground is manufacturing and selling ‘red boxes’ in large quantities. These boxes duplicate the tones generated by coins deposited in pay telephones. Through the use of ‘red boxes’ an individual is able to make long distance call[s] without depositing money. These boxes cost the underground $6 or $7 to manufacture and are currently retailing on the street at $100. All money obtained from the sale of red boxes is going towards purchase of technical equipment for further research.”
Swell. Just swell. A shadowy underground organization made up of technical wizards—wizards who might have spies within the phone company—can monitor your calls from anywhere and who might, if they chose, sell the results to of their wiretapping to the highest bidder.
Anyone with even the slightest interest in communications technology—or modern infrastructure; or the analogue-to-digital transition; or counter-culture; or regulatory history—should jump all over this book. And if you’ve never heard of “Ma Bell,” well, this is a wicked place to start learning.