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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Phil Lapsley
Read between
April 10, 2014 - March 4, 2018
Gamblers and scam artists used the telegraphic web as well, passing news of sporting events and devising schemes to cheat and defraud.
Cheat.
This problem befuddled AT&T for years, until 1917, when one of the company’s engineers hit upon the system we’re so familiar with today: the letters “ABC” would be associated with the digit 2, “DEF” with 3, and so on. Callers would use just the first two or three letters of the exchange name plus the telephone number to dial a call.
As the old saying goes, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Engineers are funny animals. If you tell an engineer about a problem, any problem, his first instinct is to measure it. Tell an engineer you don’t love him anymore and he’ll ask for a graph of your love over time so that he can understand exactly how big the problem is and when it started.
If you were making illegal calls you had no right to privacy. The phone company could tap your line and turn the recordings over to law enforcement.
Illegal calls don't have privacy.
When he was fourteen, Acker decided it would be cool to find out where all the area codes were. He’s not sure today exactly why he thought this would be cool, but teenagers are like that—it seemed like a good idea at the time.
When I was young I thought t wad cool to memorize alk the telecodes for Chinese char.
because knowledge shared is knowledge expanded,
Compared to the phone phreaks, the Bell Labs engineers were laboring under a great disadvantage, for they understood how the system was supposed to work and that blinded them to how the system actually did work—and therefore how it could be made to do things it was never designed to do.
“We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
Monopoly
If the old game was to understand, appreciate, and play with the telephone network, the new game was to make free calls and screw Ma Bell and the government.
The giant cyber-mechanical-human system that was the telephone network, the largest machine in the world, was now almost entirely computers talking to one another via modems.
