Joe became famous in 1971 when Ron Rosenbaum catalogued his phreaking skills in the Esquire article. But he had first come to public attention two years earlier, when he was discovered whistling into a pay phone at the University of South Florida. Joe, by this time a twenty-year-old university student, had mastered the science of multifrequency tones and, with perfect pitch, could simply whistle the 2600-cycle note down the line, and then whistle up any phone number he wanted to call. The local telephone company, determined to stamp out phreaking, had publicized the case, and Joe's college had disciplined him. Later, realizing that he was too well known to the authorities to continue phreaking in Florida, he moved on to Memphis, which was where Rosenbaum found him.
In 1970 Joe was living in a small room surrounded by the paraphernalia of phreaking. Even more than phreaking, however, Joe's real obsession was the phone system itself. His ambition, he told Rosenbaum, was to work for Ma Bell. He was in love with the phone system, and his hobby, he claimed, was something he called phone tripping: he liked to visit telephone switching stations and quiz the company engineers about the workings of the system. Often he knew more than they did. Being blind, he couldn't see anything, but he would run his hands down the masses of wiring coiled around the banks of circuitry. He could learn how the links were made just by feeling his way through the connections in the wiring, and in this way, probably gained more knowledge than most sighted visitors.
Joe had moved to Tennessee because that state had some interesting independent phone districts. Like many phreakers, Joe was fascinated by the independents-- small, private phone companies not controlled by Bell--because of their idiosyncrasies. Though all of the independents were linked to Bell as part of the larger North American phone network, they often used different equipment (some of it older), or had oddities within the system that phreakers liked to explore.
By that time the really topflight phreakers were more interested in exploring than making free calls. They had discovered that the system, with all of its links, connections, and switches, was like a giant electronic playground, with tunnels from one section to another, pathways that could take calls from North America to Europe and back again, and links that could reach satellites capable of beaming calls anywhere in the world.
One of the early celebrated figures was a New York-based phreaker who used his blue box to call his girlfriend in Boston on weekends--but never directly. First he would call a 1-800 number somewhere in the country, skip out of it onto the international operator's circuit, and surface in Rome, where he would redirect the call to an operator in Hamburg. The Hamburg operator would assume the call originated in Rome and accept the instructions to patch it to Boston. Then the phreaker would speak to his girlfriend, his voice bouncing across the Atlantic to a switch in Rome, up to Hamburg, and then back to Boston via satellite. The delay would have made conversation difficult, but, of course, conversation was never the point.
Few phreakers ever reached that level of expertise. The community was never huge--there were probably never more than a few hundred real, diehard phone phreaks--but it suddenly began to grow in the late 1960s as the techniques became more widely known. Part of the impetus for this growth was the increased access to conference lines, which allowed skills and lore to be more widelv disseminated.
Conference lines--or conference bridges--are simply special switches that allow several callers to participate in a conversation at the same time. The service, in those days, was generally promoted to businesses, but bridges were also used by the telephone company for testing and training. For instance, the 1121 conference lines were used to train Bell operators: they could dial the number to hear a recording of calls being made from a pay phone, including the pings of the coins as they dropped, so that they could become familiar with the system. If two phreakers rang any one of the 1121 training numbers, they could converse, though the constant pinging as the coins dropped on the recording was distracting.
Far better were lines like 2111, the internal company code for Telex testing. For six months in the late 1960s phreakers congregated on a disused 2111 test line located somewhere in a telephone office in Vancouver. It became an enormous clubhouse, attracting both neophyte and experienced MF-ers in a continuing conference call. To participate, phreakers needed only to MF their way through a 1-800 number onto the Vancouver exchange and then punch out 2111.
