"Mr Moneybox"

[Tony Whitley]

Hi all,

I wrote the software for the "Moneybox" payphone (which involved a fair bit of input to the mechanics and electronics) back in 1984/5.  Prior to that I worked at GEC writing the software for their offering for the BT street payphone tender (won by Plessey which was a nasty shock as we didn't know they were tendering).

The attractions of payphones were eclipsed by the new kid on the block, cellular phones, and I moved to Technophone and spent most of the rest of my career writing mobile phone software.

I still have the engineering model Moneybox and the source code listings are in the attic! I have many war stories from those days, if you're not careful I may post some of them. As a taster: we wanted to test the coin mechanism for weaknesses so ordered (from memory) £3,000 of 10p pieces from the local bank.  This was an unusual request which took quite a while to fulfil! When they finally arrived I opened them up to find they were all newly-minted where we wanted used coins to see the effect of dirt build up; we returned them the same day and expressed our requirements more precisely which must have made us the bank's least-favourite customer 

https://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=8634.msg92676#msg92676