Telephone humor on TV [telecom]

Where's my Cap'n Crunch whistle when I need it?

R's, John

It's stored right next to the SF units.

Bill Horne Moderator

Or, they could have one of those 1970's little Touchtone boxes lying around, that you held against the mouthpiece then keyed in the desired tones. I had one; it worked quite well actually. Powered by a 9 v battery.

I had one of those boxes, coincidentally colored blue. It worked extremely well on the payphones at Santa Barbara City College, which functioned normally without coins being deposited - except that the dial was disabled.

Bill Horne Moderator

True enough, if, and that's _if_, the v-mail system is "really" listening for true dual-frequency Touch Tones. A least in the Good Old Early Daze, when filtering for Touch Tones required Real Circuitry, many systems just looked for one of the tones.

(And yes, of course, that limited the keypad options).

In the 1980s Touch Tone was a premium charge service*. I discovered back then that even if a phone line was not equipped for Touch Tone sometimes a TT phone would work on it, sometimes not. If memory serves, a rotary line served by a No. 5 crossbar supported TT, but a line from an ESS did not. I suspect in the xbar it was easier just to wire everybody in rather than bother to make a distinction while in ESS it was controlled by computer.

Indeed, with SxS and XBAR the entire office was either "on" or "off" for DTMF. With ESS it could be by line, but here in California at least, Pacific Bell elected to turn the entire office "on" in ESS offices, because of liability issues of denying origination service in an emergency.

The then Western Electric advised the BOCs that it cost more in ESS origination equipment to service dial pulse origination time than to equip for 100% DTMF. So, that's the way a lot, if not all, BOCs bought ESS, then digital switches.

I think you stored it in the blue box. *grin*

_MORE_ than once, during a phone call, I whistled at something the person on the other end said, and the phone system hung up the call. D*mn that

I had several friends that could manually whistle at a Bell 103 modem well enough send specific characters. There was also one guy who could whistle up a Bell 212 modem well enough to have it hear one particular string of characters -- nothing meaningful, but absolutely consistent.

I recall my first trouble report on an SF-supervised trunk. I was talking to a guy in Atlanta, and I said "let's see if it responds to

Bill Horne Moderator

SxS had no native DTMF mode. To provide Touch-Tone in a SxS office required a translator that listened for DTMF and DP and translated DTMF to DP. Often only certain line finder groups would be equipped with such translators because they had to monitor every call to see if their services were needed. The translation equipment was pretty expensive. This also meant some customers had to have their numbers changed to get Touch-Tone.

The situation would be different in Southern California, which was originally all SxS and with growth in the population and network routing requirments had to have senders in each office to route outgoing calls. Those were equipped with translation equipment for all calls, and adding DTMF was not that big a deal. Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

I don't know much about SxS other than I was served by a GTE stepper when they enabled the entire office for DTMF. And, yes, I was painfully aware that it converted it all back to DP. I could hear it as I waited for it.