Phone Trips

I first mirrored these in the early 2000s because I was worried it would eventually vanish. my mirror has been gone for decades, and the original survives. :)

This is such a great site. Any of Evan Doorbell's "How I Became a Phone Phreak" or "Sounds of Long Distance" are especially great.

>OK, so what are these recordings all about? Why are they here?

>Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay and 35 years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it's true: just like the people in the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns primarily for the purpose of playing with their payphones. I often brought along my trusty Craig 212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was before cassettes were popular) to record the phone noises and narrate information about them for my friends. I don't go on phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that this is because I grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone tripping is that all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays and they are really boring.

>This picture shows my recording equipment around 1968, which I used to edit these tapes and prepare them for playing on a public phone number. My current desk is just as messy, but with PC's instead of reel-to-reel tape recorders.

>There have been 1237108 accesses to this page.

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>Secrets of the Little Blue Box (1971)

https://www.ckts.info/downloads/articles/Esquire%20Magazine%...