In the early 80’s the phone system was kind of a passing interest of mine – specifically the rapidly developing digital switching systems that were replacing the very mechanical and very analog systems that had been commonplace for so long.
To be fair, a lot of my interest stemmed from Ma Bell telling everyone they couldn’t know about how it worked – which turned it into a challenge. And then the breakup of AT&T in 1984 really stirred the pot and generated a lot more interest.
In what was probably a lucky move for me, I joined the Navy in ’86 and that more or less removed me from contact with the phreaking community before I got into serious trouble. But that only lasted until 1993 when I started to get back into it again.
In the early 90’s most of my free moments were invested in BBS culture, which extensively utilized the phone system and in-turn became a haven for people with a shared interest in such things. Eventually things turned from theoretical telecom exploration to some physical efforts, but I insisted that if we were going to lay hands on the system that we maintained some morals; we would never cause harm to the system and we would never exploit the system. Our goal was simply to learn more about the system – not break shit and cause chaos.
Over a three year period, before I took off to Virginia and Ice headed to college, we did a lot of telecom spelunking and learned a ton about how Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph / US West operated in the “303”. Everything we did held to our strict code of conduct, so we never interrupted service or caused problems for anyone.
Probably the coolest part of what we did though was the scenery we got to see while we were tracing out the system. In Colorado the phone system has to reach places that you only see on postcards, so scenic photography was just as important on our outings as documenting what we found.
Early this morning I headed out to visit a few places we ‘discovered’ back in the 90’s. These days I have to go pretty far afield to find things that still exist – but there are still a few out there.
Listening to "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson