Classic Rotary Phones Forum

Telephone Switching => General Switching Discussions => General CO Talk => Topic started by: Dennis Markham on October 14, 2009, 09:28:51 PM

Title: Beep Beep Line - Talking Conference over CO Busy Signal
Post by: Dennis Markham on October 14, 2009, 09:28:51 PM
Back in the mid 1960's when I was a kid growing up in northern Alabama it became common knowledge amongst school kids that the phone could be used to meet people in a strange way.  If one dialed their own telephone number a busy signal would result.  If one were to speak into the phone during the silence between the beeps of the busy signal, other people enjoying the rhythm of that signal could hear what the person said between beeps.  Before long it spread like wildfire and the busy signal was a cacophony of shouts, asking "what-is-your-name?" or "what-is-your number?"  Guys and girls were meeting, shouting phone numbers between the beeps.  The final thing that would be said was "hang up" where the boy would call the girl or vice-versa.

Years later when I moved to Michigan, still in high school I told someone about it and we tried it.   Before long the whole school was doing it.  Just as suddenly as it started, it ended.

I wrote a posting about it on my blog site.  It can be seen here.  

http://www.vintagerotaryphones.com/?p=100

Some of you may have seen it.  I got several responses from people in Minnesota that called it the Jam-Line.  There is even a sound byte that a guy sent me of an actual call he recorded back in the day.

So my question is why did this work?  What was taking place at the Central Office and what did the phone company do to stop it?  Surely there were aware of it.  It even worked from a pay phone.  One could "drop a dime" in, dial the number on the pay phone and be connected to the beep-beep line.  After hooking up with someone the user could hang up the pay phone and wait for a return call.....and even get their dime back.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Dennis Markham on October 14, 2009, 09:34:21 PM
I just realized that the link I provided above will take you to a second posting I made about the Beep-Beep line.  The first sentence will re-direct you to the original post.  This link however, provides the audio clip.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 09:39:17 PM
We had this in Portland, Oregon too, but it ended one day too.  About the same time period also.  Seems to me like we dialed a particular number that was always busy, then flashed the switch hook once, but just for the right amount of time off then back on again, then we would be in this never-never land of what seemed like hundreds of people all trying to hook up for dates with unknown girls and so forth.  We really had to yell to get heard above all the others.  But, like you described, one day we did this and suddenly it would not work any more.  Them were the good ol' days, right?

Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 09:41:58 PM
I just played your recording.  Yep, That's the way it was!

Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Dennis Markham on October 14, 2009, 09:45:54 PM
Bill, maybe you or your friend may know why such a thing was able to take place.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 09:53:40 PM
I never did find out why, but I'll ask him.  His name is Colin Chambers, and I think he probably knows because I think he was also a phone phreak, if you know what that is.

Relating to another discussion on calling party supervision, I found out the hard way not to make prank calls to the operator, because the operator can take over supervision, as can 911 these days.  I called the operator one night doing my prank calls, and she would not give back control over the line until I got my mom or dad on the phone and gave them a Lily Tomlin-like lecture.  Needless to say, I got in trouble, and I did not use the operator any more to make prank calls to.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 09:58:41 PM
Speaking of phone phreaks, who here knows about those "blue boxes"?

-Bill
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: bwanna on October 14, 2009, 10:00:07 PM
Quote from: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 09:58:41 PM
Speaking of phone phreaks, who here knows about those "blue boxes"?

-Bill

??? ??? ??? ???
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 10:07:13 PM
There is more written on this than I can sumarize, but it has to do with the old way of in-band signaling using 2600 Hz and the predecessor to DTMF which was MF, or simply multifrequency signalling.

Google terms like "phone phreaks" or "Evan Doorbell" or even "Blue Box".

It was a way of hyjacking the phone system in the 60's and 70's to make free long distance calls.

-Bill
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Dennis Markham on October 14, 2009, 11:18:21 PM
I don't recall the details, but I think there was a famous Court case involving someone that made and sold these blue boxes.  BDM was telling me about it once.  Maybe he'll chime in here.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: McHeath on October 14, 2009, 11:37:43 PM
Supposedly Steve Wozniak was a phone phreak and used his blue box to connect to the Pope once and pretended he was Henry Kissinger.  Don't know the truth of it all, but the blue boxes were real and a way to use tone sounds to take over control of the central station switching and get free toll calls. 

None of it works anymore as the system has been changed. 
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Greg G. on October 15, 2009, 12:38:23 AM
Quote from: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2009, 10:07:13 PM
There is more written on this than I can sumarize, but it has to do with the old way of in-band signaling using 2600 Hz and the predecessor to DTMF which was MF, or simply multifrequency signalling.

Google terms like "phone phreaks" or "Evan Doorbell" or even "Blue Box".

It was a way of hyjacking the phone system in the 60's and 70's to make free long distance calls.

-Bill

I remember hearing about those when Bob Cummings, the actor, was busted for using one.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Greg G. on October 15, 2009, 12:40:36 AM
Quote from: Dennis Markham on October 14, 2009, 09:28:51 PM
Back in the mid 1960's when I was a kid growing up in northern Alabama it became common knowledge amongst school kids that the phone could be used to meet people in a strange way.  If one dialed their own telephone number a busy signal would result.  If one were to speak into the phone during the silence between the beeps of the busy signal, other people enjoying the rhythm of that signal could hear what the person said between beeps.  Before long it spread like wildfire and the busy signal was a cacophony of shouts, asking "what-is-your-name?" or "what-is-your number?"  Guys and girls were meeting, shouting phone numbers between the beeps.  The final thing that would be said was "hang up" where the boy would call the girl or vice-versa.

I had never heard of that and I'm about the same age as you.  We amused ourselves with the "Prince Albert in a can" or "Do you have pig's feet?" phone pranks.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 15, 2009, 12:54:19 AM
Is your refrigerator running?

I also used to look people up in the phone book ar random and get their address and phone number, then call their number.  Lets say I call someone name Jane Jones at 123 Main street:

"Hello, is this Jane Jones?"
"Yes....."
"Well, Ma'am are you at 123 Main?"
".....yes,...Why do you ask???"
"Well, Ma'am, This is Howard Johnson from Johnson's Towing and Wrecking.... (Heavy faked Bronx accent)...And I can't find your house"

"Why are you looking for my house??"
"Well, Ma'am, we got this call to come and tow your car... Can you give me directions?"

Click
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: bwanna on October 15, 2009, 06:15:10 AM
briny, i had not heard of the beepbeep line until i read about it on dennis website a while back. you & i must have been nice well-behaved children. not the type of hooligan who was  looking for ways to cause trouble & foul up the phone co. :D
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Phonesrfun on October 15, 2009, 12:05:22 PM
Reply from the Guru:
-------------------------------------------------
A very common old time conference line

Busy Signals were generated by one interrupter.... distribution was by a resistive network.

Best example:  An amplifier, a few watts has a 600 Ohm output. EACH connection to the amplifier, and there may be hundreds, or just 10 (each being one rack) is connected by one resistor to the tip and one resistor to the ring.

This is a simple manner to distribute the audio, every once gets connect, but with a small value resistor. This way they are somewhat isolated, but not totally. If one short occurs it is really just a resistor across the amplifier and nothing happens, well perhaps a slight decrease in volume. The assumption was, in the early days, nobody would talk during a busy signal and with the resistors for each "path" there was a reduction in the talk volume between paths

So it became necessary to shout into the line, talking a normal volume was a bit low.

It would be better to use an amplifier that had an output resistance of ... say 16 ohms, then to use two each 330 ohm resistors to each path, this would mean the only common connection between paths would be the 16 ohms of the amplifier to "talk over" and it would have been near impossible. Actually in practice one isolation set of resistors would serve one bank of connectors in a step office, so anyone on that bank could easily talk. And the 16 ohms was probably 600 ohms, so that made it a lot easier to talk over.

In the early days it was felt that the Z had to be a nearly perfect match. This is not quite so in practice and severe mismatch between circuit is not usually a problem. It is if you have amplifiers and repeaters, but even so a mismatch is often not an issue.


-Bill
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: Dennis Markham on October 15, 2009, 02:50:26 PM
Bill, thank you and your Guru.  I guess it's just easier to remember it as the beep-beep line.  I'm sure Jorge understands all that electrical stuff.  I appreciate you asking your friend about it.  I kinda sorta understood some of it, maybe. :)

Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: rp2813 on October 20, 2009, 03:18:11 PM
I never knew about any Beep Beep system.  That would have been fun.

I do remember the blue boxes.  As I recall, there was a guy who went by "Captain Crunch" who was a notorious blue box user.  I don't know if they ever caught him.  I think he "operated" out of the San Luis Obispo area in California.

Ralph
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line - Talking Conference over CO Busy Signal
Post by: AE_Collector on November 27, 2012, 01:29:09 AM
I don't think that I saw a reply to Dennis' question "What brought this to an end".

I recall us doing "Talk over Busy Mods" in the Strowger CO's around Vancouver, probably in the late 70's. That brought the Conference Calls to an end here!

Terry
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line
Post by: DavePEI on December 10, 2012, 06:34:14 AM
Quote from: bwanna on October 15, 2009, 06:15:10 AM
briny, i had not heard of the beepbeep line until i read about it on dennis website a while back. you & i must have been nice well-behaved children. not the type of hooligan who was  looking for ways to cause trouble & foul up the phone co. :D
I, too remember it. It was amazing to see how many people used it at any one time. Great fun!

Dave
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line - Talking Conference over CO Busy Signal
Post by: DoctorZ on January 01, 2013, 02:56:32 AM
Hello everyone!  I'm the guy who posted the audio clip over at Dennis' other web site about Rotary Phones.  I also was a Jam Line (Beep Line) addict for several years starting in High School.  I was reading the technical description of how it happened here with some interest.  It is quite different from what I was told by the local Phone Phreakers in Minnesota.  The explanation here was Ma Bell was experimenting around with Electronic Switching (ESS) so they could convert all their old equipment from mechanical relays.  In order to do this right, Ma Bell would hook in the ESS prototypes in parallel with the existing exchange step-offices.  In doing this, it created an internal loop in the lines that created the ability to talk across the busy signal.  Here in Minnesota in the 1970's, Jam Lines were usually confined to one or two prefixes at any one time, and they came and went for over a decade while the phone company perfected the ESS switching we take for granted today.

Near as I can tell the Jam Line got it's start here in the Twin Cities area when the local Rock radio station started using Request Lines for callers to call in and win stuff.  The first caller got through to the DJ, and the rest would get the Jam Line.  How many people could get the Jam Line was dependent on how big the relay exchange office was, but usually was limited to about 20 callers before the circuits became overloaded and crashed the trunk line, forcing Ma Bell to reroute traffic.

Of course, when crashes started happening on a regular basis, Ma Bell would send someone out to investigate and the Jam Line would be "turned off."  Fortunately for us here in the Twin Cities, we had the benefit of two unique phenomenon:
1.  All the regular Jam Liners knew all the Ma Bell test lines.  We called these "Loop Line" or some called them the "Hot Line."  For more information on this topic see this entry in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_around


What our local Phone Phreakers would do after a Jam Line was shut down was head down to the local library and sit down with the City Directory.  They would then choose the telephone Prefix they wanted to start the next Jam Line on, and look for gaps in the sequence of phone numbers listed.  Whenever they saw a break in sequence they would write that number down.  After collecting several "unassigned" telephone numbers they would go home and call them to see if any were "perpetually busy."  When a number wasn't assigned here in the Twin Cities, it would either have a recording saying it was out of service, ring and ring with no answer, or be busy.  It was the ones that were busy they took note of.  After verifying an unassigned busy number worked as a Jam Line, the Phreakers would then make a quick tape-recording running on a loop saying, "The new Jam Line number is: XXX-XXXX" and call up one of the Loop Lines and leave the recording playing over and over again for a few days.....
2. The second thing the Twin Cities had going for it in the 70's was it had the largest geographical toll-free calling area in the world!  We still have the largest toll-free calling area in the USA to this day.  Back in the 1970's, this large toll-free calling area coupled with the second largest subscriber base at 1.2 million, made it a Jam Line paradise.
The recording posted on Loop Line would spread like wild-fire through the high schools by word of mouth, and within days a new Jam Line would start to emerge.

In the 1960's the Twin Cities had sporadic Jam Lines from as early as 1962, through 1970, which were dependent on which radio station request line prefix happened to be hooked in parallel with ESS at the time.  By 1971 through 1984, it was all Phone Phreaker driven using the Loop Lines.  The last Jam Line in the Twin Cities was started by me in 1984.  In early 1983 my mom had received notice that Custom Calling would become available in our area the next year.  I went down to the local library and started collecting unassigned phone numbers and when the Jam Line we were using went deaf, I was ready!  Unfortunately, the final death of the Jam Line in Minnesota was the result of a deadly tornado.  I've posted that story here:
http://www.skywarnonline.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-4761.html

After that I thought the Jam Line would forever just be a fond memory of my youth, until I found our Host's first web site about vintage phones where I was asked if he could post a small audio clip of an old Jam Line tape recording I had made back in 1977.  That small sound bite caught the attention of a local news reporter for Minnesota Public Radio, (MPR) who herself had called the Jam Line as a young teenager here in the Twin Cities.  It took her awhile to track me down, but she was successful and just after Christmas MPR did a special news report on the Twin Cities Jam Line complete with audio clips from my old recordings.  You can read about it here, and listen to the actual broadcast as it has been archived on the MPR site here:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/12/24/arts/jam-line/

Don't forget to click on the "Featured Audio" link!

Thanks for reading,
--Russell
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line - Talking Conference over CO Busy Signal
Post by: George Knighton on January 01, 2013, 09:34:06 AM
Quote from: Phonesrfun on October 15, 2009, 12:05:22 PM
Reply from the Guru:
-------------------------------------------------
A very common old time conference line

Busy Signals were generated by one interrupter.... distribution was by a resistive network.

Best example:  An amplifier, a few watts has a 600 Ohm output. EACH connection to the amplifier, and there may be hundreds, or just 10 (each being one rack) is connected by one resistor to the tip and one resistor to the ring.

Ahhh haaaaa......

Typical SNAFU.

Whatever system you roll out, you will never fully appreciate just how people will use it in some fashion you did not intend.
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line - Talking Conference over CO Busy Signal
Post by: DoctorZ on June 17, 2013, 03:45:00 AM
There is a new Facebook group started up for everyone who used to call the telephone Beep Lines:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/153223924861685/
Title: Re: Beep Beep Line - Talking Conference over CO Busy Signal
Post by: Shovelhead on June 23, 2013, 09:36:14 PM
More useless trivia, Farmington Michigan, the Greenleaf exchange, the number was 476-9999. Don't ask me why I still remember this from the mid 60's. It just all came back to me while reading this thread.