Evan Doorbell's Phone Tapes: A 1970s Time Capsule of the Telephone Network

I grew up at the tail end of analog phone switches in my part of the country. The little town where I grew up and the surrounding towns had some kind of analog switches. Being owned by an independent telephone company the switches could have been something really oddball, too. I wish I knew what they were.

I hear sounds in some of Evan Doorbell's tapes that are familiar to me (the MF signaling when placing a long distance call, for example), but my memories of the local switch sounds are so fuzzy that I don't think I'll ever be able to identify it by sound alone. I had a magnetic pickup coil and made some phone recordings but never systematically recorded the sounds of the switches or the network. I wish I would have. At my age I never thought about those things as fleeting.

I was interested in "playing with the phone" but with no connection to the phreaking scene I didn't really know what I was doing. I remember finding some odd sounds in the "00xx" or "99xx" numbers in local exchanges but I don't know what I was hearing.

I did figure out I could call numbers "adjacent" my friends' numbers (4723 and 4725 for my friends' 4724) and they'd report hearing their phones w/ mechanical ringers sort of "buzz" but not actually ring (and we used this as a way to sneak phone calls late at night sometimes). I assume this was an artifact of the switches supporting "party lines" (multi-drop POTS services where multiple subscribers shared the same physical wire pair).

Some time in the early […]