Hey, Mike from PhilTel here! Interesting note about the provenance of your phone here. The label ECTL/TSG on your housing stands for Elcotel / Technology Service Group. Elcotel was a COCOT manufacturer creating smart boards (and supporting hardware for these boards, but the boards were also attractive as drop-in replacements for WE boards if you happened upon a Fortress and wanted to make money but were not a traditional telco), and TSG was a payphone refurb/service company. In '97 Elcotel acquired TSG, and then later acquired the payphone arm of Western Electric folding the assets into TSG. I have a "factory" cobbled-together TSG payphone made with WE parts of different vintage and a TSG-produced coin board all with QA stickers from the same date so you know they were just grabbing NOS or refurb components off shelves to build out these phones for telcos operating coin lines. As for your board, it's hard to tell the exact revision as Sarah mentions but any 32B which is typically branded Western Electric or AT&T would be a drop-in replacement. I think a 32A/32C would also work. As for the fate of Elcotel, they were acquired by QuorTech who also purchased Millennium assets from Nortel in 2000.
Big fan of Connections Museum. Sarah is awesome! I was with a pack of Cub Scouts at a ranger station on the Appalachian trail, and they had an old pay phone. The kids had never seen one before!
My brother found a payphone just outside of a Colorado mountain town and it was way off the road, like 50+ft away from the road, much to his surprise it has service and works! He ran out of quarters before he could call me.
with the title you're seriously underestimating an average geeks need to find and consume random content on various topics that isnt being SEO force fed during searches
@richardlangly4635 do you not understand how adjectives work? Adjectives describe it provide additional information about a noun. A blonde woman is a woman. A brunette woman is a woman. A tall woman is a woman. A short woman is a woman. A trans woman is a woman. A cis woman is a woman. A rich woman is a woman. A poor woman is a woman. The idea that a subset of a group, identified by an adjective, is not part of the group is absurd.
@@phyphor I understand adjectives very well. I'd ask you the same question of biology, noting that a man cannot be a woman. A trans woman is a type of man. It's a fiction to say otherwise.
@@phyphor A trans woman is a type of man. Men cannot become women. You may choose to go along with the 'polite' fiction that denies biology, but I am not obligated to.
@@phyphor I understand adjectives. Do you understand biology? Men cannot become women. Also, if you're the one deleting my replies, it's a real shame. I wish people would have the courage of their convictions to argue their point and not just silence people because you disagree. And I don't mean any disrespect to trans people, but it damages women for men to pretend they are women (and indeed vice-versa).
My best friend passed away yesterday. He was the one who got me into hacking and pentesting content. He taught me that you don't need a degree to start messing around and failing forward. We would always discuss your videos when they came out. I can't hit him up on Discord anymore and of course it hurts. But knowing there's a whole community of helpful, empathetic and passionate people out there makes it hurt a little less. Keep doing what you're doing Dev, it matters.
TIL I'm a hyper phone nerd. Even without a resolution I thoroughly enjoyed watching this video. I've never seen the inside of a payphone before and this was fascinating. Realizing how much of the phone is devoted to billing is also interesting. I remember as a child, finding a payphone in the back of the local Kmart had a return coin lever that would give you a quarter every time you pushed it, even if you hadn't put any money in. I was raised to be honest so I reported it to the owner listed on the phone, offering to return the few dollars in quarters I had collected. Now I understand why the company was so grateful and let me keep the money I had collected. If they hadn't already been losing money on that phone, they would have and the phone was about the money more than the service it provided
Hahaha! The stickers with date and tester, those make me think they came from the shop I worked at for 18 years! We used those exact stickers and I know a person from the paystation department whose inatials are KF. I worked on repairing phone systems like System 75, later became Definity, and the whole line of Merlin systems. What I do know about payphones are some of the parts have to be calibrated to work with the board. Just replacing a part doesn't mean it will work. I know that shop is still in business, but they don't do much with payphones anymore. I actually did some work at home on the side for them repairing dials for prison phones, the dial is essentially the whole phone. I still have a Protel Tec-20 that I used to test them. It's meant for testing payphones. It can provide loop and ground start, has an LCD that will display what is dialed, show the number from a credit card reader on a phone, and tell you what coins are deposited through the coin mech. Just fun seeing some old stuff like this i recognize!
Ohhh sheeet no way you and Sarah did a thing! I've been hoping for this for AGES, and of course somehow you already know each other!! Damn sometimes I love the internet
I thought I recognized the person next to you in the thumbnail, took me a few seconds to realize that it’s Sarah! Looking forward to the next installment.
1. Gender is weird, I am not totally sure what I am but most of my loved ones drop me somewhere in the queer bucket for various reasons 2. The majority of my closest friends and loved ones are either trans or gender nonconforming 💚
Growing up in the early 2000s, I remember watching a documentary on phone phreaking and wanted to build a bluebox so bad, ever since I was super interested in phones. Thanks for this Dev!
When the world slips you a Geoffrey, stroke the furry wall edit: Not a hyper phone nerd. I'm a hyper whatever-the-hell-sounds-interesting-today nerd. Why yes, I DO watch Technology Connections.
Well, it's not exactly _buying_ two of them, but since they're going to replace the insides with those of a working phone from the museum's stash . . .
The Connections museum is a fucking treasure. It's like the ultimate phone geek HQ. Everyone there is just so into phone stuff, and so excited to to explain the equipment to people, no matter how obscure the thing they have is someone there will know everything about it. It's a true gem and something rare in today's world. I encourage anyone who is a geek or geek adjacent to visit it if they are in Seattle. And don't cheap out at the donation box.
I love the ending and talking about troubleshooting. So much in troubleshooting anything eventually involves. Your normal problem children issues and then your easy to trouble shoot while your there problems. Like 95% or more of the problems I troubleshoot are resolved by step 5 of things I check out of Habbit and not bother looking up that specific problem.
Look around a little bit and discover one of the most elaborate practical jokes, ever, hiding in plain sight! I am in love with this collaboration, there is so much great content here all ROLLED into one fascinating video.
A note on what you said about the troubleshooting being most of the repair. As a locksmith who's mostly industrial and commercial these days I don't do a LOT of residential, but I'll still take those calls and over the years I've figured out how to walk customers through some basic troubleshooting over the phone so either 1. It's an issue the customer doesn't even NEED me for, because they can do it themselves with a screwdriver 2. I have a REALLY good idea of what I'm gonna be dealing with and can give them a "It appears to be X problem, if it is, this is the estimate", or 3. I'm still completely befuddled and now it's something I NEED to figure out.
I’ve never been to Seattle, but that museum has been on my bucket list for a couple of years now. And I am already subscribed to their channel. Thanks for the crossover!
I'm not a phone nerd, but i am an electronics geek, so i'll happily watch this. though if the old phreaking was still around, i'd probably be doing it.
What a delight! I found the connections museum RUclips channel last year and I'm fascinated by the work they do, so this colab is awesome! I'm so looking forward to part 2
So many memories, you're actually covering a topic I'm super familiar with having "experimented" with phones especially payphones since around 1994, and 10 years in telecom starting around 2002 - Just small steps in my journey - I'm more computers and servers now.
Great folks over at the connections museum. You can spend HOURS there and still not learn even a quarter of the knowledge they have. Always a fun trip to make.
I may not be a meganerd, but the gothy danish antique that lives on the dresser behind me (and even occasionally gets plugged into a bluetooth adapter) has to count for something. XD
What you were doing reminds me a lot of the old school phone hacking that I used to do ( back in the day). Nice to see the old manuals being used- still . Plus you gave me a new bucket list destination. Great video Dev.
Really looking forward to seeing part 2, seeing two of my favourite hackers collaborating on something so cool. To be fair, I've never stopped being a phreak, so phone stuff like this is candy to me.
Great video. Awesome to see the respect you two have for each other, seems like a fantastic relationship. I'm invested to see how this phone ends up getting fixed!
I see Sarah in a video thumbnail and I click on it :D Despite 40 years in server and big iron programming/maintenance I wasn't a phone geek until lockdown, all down to the Connections Museum videos.
It's always fascinating watching someone comfortable and experienced with an electronic/mechanism. It always seems almost violent the way they manipulate parts. With no experience I'd be so slow and dainty in my manipulations :).
There are probably words for how excited I am to see Conectios Sarah and the interwebs Dev fixing a pay phone, but I'm far too twiterpated with excitement to find thoes words
"most of us have stories [where we should have tried the easy shit first]" yeah... guilty as charged. At least we mostly learned from that and now actually plug stuff in...
Haha weird to see how small the world is with Deav at a place I've been, working with people I've met and using names I recognize. I've gotta see about coming through to the connections museum again. A lot of fun the first time I went.
18:25 '...swap-out the guts', Things you say that make non-tech nerds look at you funny. I love using 'guts' when referring to electronics builds/projects; that and to, 'cannibalize' something for parts is another goodie ;P
Depot level repair is super common in telecom, have a field tech troubleshoot and swap a module or a whole box, take it back to the shop, put a bunch into a box and ship em to a repair facility. It means that repair techs can specialize, get to know the schematics for a few models, common fails, etc. When I did 4g cell tower radios, I could troubleshoot ~75% of problems with about 8 multimeter measurements. 12 layer boards, 12x15 inches. Anyways, you are probably running into the issue that schematics and repair manuals can be limited to the repair depots, not widely distributed for field techs. Great for business and productivity, not great for conservation.
I don't think there is a better thumbnail you could craft to get me to click on a video faster. Two of my favourite niche content creators doing a crossover episode!
Wild. I hadn't come across your channel before, but this just popped up on my RUclips home page. We were actually on the same tour with Sarah back in May.
Still excited that I have the same rainbow glasses. So many compliments on them day to day. I am trans and whenever anyone says they like my glasses I am like "thanks! I have to show I am gay somehow."
That looks like a pretty standard late ‘70s board. What is great about the single slot body is that everything is modular and easy to swap. I got a really sweet super clean Pac Bell phone with T-handle, security keys and mounting frame from eBay which was apparently cabbaged up by Pac Bell to work like an extension phone. The vault was missing, and they had cut the 1A relay and put a cable tie through the armature so it just rejected coins to the chute. What a mess! I found a place called Triad in Youngstown, Ohio that has just about any pay phone or COCOT part you could want for very reasonable prices. I got a new 1A relay and newer DIP switch programmable totalizer, electronic coin rejecter, vault and a few cosmetic parts. I put everything back to spec and set it up as dial tone first. If someone puts coins in, they’ll hear the beeps from the totalizer, but the coins will sit in the 1A hopper. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a coin exchange simulator with an Arduino and a 60 volt supply to operate the relay. I’ve also got a very nice chrome Northern Electric 3-slot coin first which has a Cincinnati, Ohio exchange on the dial card. The 3-slot requires an external subset to supply the network and ringer. I found a brand new in box subset on eBay. It is pretty easy to bridge a couple contacts on the 1A relay to just make the talk path live all the time and use it as an extension phone. Triad has advanced boards if you want to turn your single slot pay phone into a COCOT. You can set local call rate as well as rate tables and local timers for long distance calls, if you want. I kept my original board, but I suspect the sound quality on newer boards is better because they have better networks. I found having a Station Services Specialty Manual is a must to de-cabbage eBay finds and put them back to normal spec. There are so many which are all hacked up by people who don’t know what they’re doing. The Station Services Specialty Manual is really a condensation of Bell System Practices relevant to customer premise equipment and suitable for carrying by installers. The different RBOCs apparently had their own flavors of the manual. I have one from Pac Bell which is as thick as a large metro area phone book which I found on Amazon for a few bucks. I’ve also got one from Oregon Bell supplied back in the day by a helpful family member and it is much smaller and less detailed. If you can find the Pac Bell version, grab it.
As someone who got my start in corporate IT working for a CLEC over 2 decades ago and used to spend a lot of time leaning up against the cabinets of a 5ESS or a DMS500 while working on my equipment, LOVE that there's somewhere that is keeping some of this tech alive. Absolutely added to the "must visit" list if I'm ever in Seattle with a free day. Though you may need to start a glossary post for anybody under 30. Explain what a payphone is first, then what a COCOT is, then why they look like they're armored. 😀
The last payphone I came across was in Topaz Lake on the Cali/Neva border. It had no dialtone because it was in fact a cellular device disguised as a payphone. One lifts the receiver, dials the number and press the extra button on the keypad at which time the handset would tell you how much money to drop in the phone or instruct you how to swipe a credit card in the slot. Your call is only connected upon receipt of the money so you cant do collect "we had a baby its a boy" calls like the old days.
I love that, try low hanging fruit first. Also, side note, about the museum, is it wheelchair accessible? Because I would love to take a trip to go see it, especially cause it’s only a couple hours away.
Yes, there is a ramp from the parking lot to the vestibule, there's an elevator up to the second and third floors, and the floors themselves are navigable in many places with a wheelchair. Some spots on the tour are a bit tight and might be a challenge because I don't think they are a full 36 in wide, but you would definitely be able to see quite a bit.
Two of my favorite content creators, hell no I'm not skipping this video! That museum is at the top of my list when I finally get out to seattle.
YES! Great collab
Awesome!
@@DeviantOllamlucky ducky, still gotta make it over there one day!
It's so worth the visit when you have the chance!
Seattle!
WORLDCON IS IN SEATTLE THIS YEAR!!
*Gestures widely* "I suspect there is some math and science going on in there" is my new favorite diagnostics phrase
right up there with "it appears to run on some form of electricity"
Always love working with you, Dev! Can't wait for part 2 💖
For sure! Post-ShmooCon I'll be back home for a few days and I will be missing you and looking forward to this. :-D
Hey, Mike from PhilTel here! Interesting note about the provenance of your phone here. The label ECTL/TSG on your housing stands for Elcotel / Technology Service Group. Elcotel was a COCOT manufacturer creating smart boards (and supporting hardware for these boards, but the boards were also attractive as drop-in replacements for WE boards if you happened upon a Fortress and wanted to make money but were not a traditional telco), and TSG was a payphone refurb/service company. In '97 Elcotel acquired TSG, and then later acquired the payphone arm of Western Electric folding the assets into TSG. I have a "factory" cobbled-together TSG payphone made with WE parts of different vintage and a TSG-produced coin board all with QA stickers from the same date so you know they were just grabbing NOS or refurb components off shelves to build out these phones for telcos operating coin lines. As for your board, it's hard to tell the exact revision as Sarah mentions but any 32B which is typically branded Western Electric or AT&T would be a drop-in replacement. I think a 32A/32C would also work. As for the fate of Elcotel, they were acquired by QuorTech who also purchased Millennium assets from Nortel in 2000.
I saw Sarah in the thumbnail and clicked this one so fast!
awesome... she's the best :-D
Same!
Big fan of Connections Museum. Sarah is awesome! I was with a pack of Cub Scouts at a ranger station on the Appalachian trail, and they had an old pay phone. The kids had never seen one before!
3:08 "... or at least breathing heavy." 🤣🤣🤣
My dad makes that joke more than I do
@@USBCORD11”The couch pulls out, I don’t.”
My brother found a payphone just outside of a Colorado mountain town and it was way off the road, like 50+ft away from the road, much to his surprise it has service and works! He ran out of quarters before he could call me.
Wow, neat
Old school phreaks couldn't NOT click this video..
Makes me wanna put tone on mine, instead of it just being a decoration piece...
Do you have a spare Cap’n Crunch whistle?
@@SoulClubCoffee I don't have my own.. I can whistle it tho.. 😁
with the title you're seriously underestimating an average geeks need to find and consume random content on various topics that isnt being SEO force fed during searches
Isn't half the audience autistic trans people with a passion for interesting technology?
Gotta love a woman with her own phone switch that can throw together the working innards of a pay phone for you!
@richardlangly4635 do you not understand how adjectives work? Adjectives describe it provide additional information about a noun. A blonde woman is a woman. A brunette woman is a woman. A tall woman is a woman. A short woman is a woman. A trans woman is a woman. A cis woman is a woman. A rich woman is a woman. A poor woman is a woman.
The idea that a subset of a group, identified by an adjective, is not part of the group is absurd.
@@phyphor I understand adjectives very well. I'd ask you the same question of biology, noting that a man cannot be a woman. A trans woman is a type of man. It's a fiction to say otherwise.
@@phyphor A trans woman is a type of man. Men cannot become women. You may choose to go along with the 'polite' fiction that denies biology, but I am not obligated to.
@@phyphor I understand adjectives. Do you understand biology? Men cannot become women. Also, if you're the one deleting my replies, it's a real shame. I wish people would have the courage of their convictions to argue their point and not just silence people because you disagree. And I don't mean any disrespect to trans people, but it damages women for men to pretend they are women (and indeed vice-versa).
imagine trying to be transphobic in the comments of a deviant ollam video 💀
Best. Crossover. Ever.
My best friend passed away yesterday. He was the one who got me into hacking and pentesting content. He taught me that you don't need a degree to start messing around and failing forward. We would always discuss your videos when they came out. I can't hit him up on Discord anymore and of course it hurts. But knowing there's a whole community of helpful, empathetic and passionate people out there makes it hurt a little less. Keep doing what you're doing Dev, it matters.
My condolences.
@vortextube Thank you
I am sorry for your loss. Be good to yourself.
@@Antney-u6j Thank you. I am doing my best.
I'm moved by their departure but so glad that you knew them 💚
Super ultra telephone nerd checking in! The Connections Museum is definitely on my bucket list. Great video!
TIL I'm a hyper phone nerd. Even without a resolution I thoroughly enjoyed watching this video. I've never seen the inside of a payphone before and this was fascinating.
Realizing how much of the phone is devoted to billing is also interesting. I remember as a child, finding a payphone in the back of the local Kmart had a return coin lever that would give you a quarter every time you pushed it, even if you hadn't put any money in. I was raised to be honest so I reported it to the owner listed on the phone, offering to return the few dollars in quarters I had collected. Now I understand why the company was so grateful and let me keep the money I had collected. If they hadn't already been losing money on that phone, they would have and the phone was about the money more than the service it provided
It's always a lovely surprise to see two content creators I truly dig on screen together! ❤
Fun video ! I always love phone content. I hope we get a part two. I could watch you two tinker with anything and be entertained for hours ❤
Dev…..TMC here ….Happy Holidays hope we can catch up love this old school phone video👍
Hey there you are! I've tried calling once after your holiday card arrived.... Going to try you again 😁👍
"I haven't failed.... I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work!" 🙂 Looking forwards to part 2!
Hahaha! The stickers with date and tester, those make me think they came from the shop I worked at for 18 years! We used those exact stickers and I know a person from the paystation department whose inatials are KF. I worked on repairing phone systems like System 75, later became Definity, and the whole line of Merlin systems.
What I do know about payphones are some of the parts have to be calibrated to work with the board. Just replacing a part doesn't mean it will work. I know that shop is still in business, but they don't do much with payphones anymore.
I actually did some work at home on the side for them repairing dials for prison phones, the dial is essentially the whole phone. I still have a Protel Tec-20 that I used to test them. It's meant for testing payphones. It can provide loop and ground start, has an LCD that will display what is dialed, show the number from a credit card reader on a phone, and tell you what coins are deposited through the coin mech.
Just fun seeing some old stuff like this i recognize!
Ohhh sheeet no way you and Sarah did a thing! I've been hoping for this for AGES, and of course somehow you already know each other!! Damn sometimes I love the internet
Sarah and I are very close, I'm so fortunate to say 💚
@@DeviantOllam Beautiful human beings ❤
I didn't know I was a phone nerd until seeing some of Sarah's videos and going down the rabbit hole so much cool information
I thought I recognized the person next to you in the thumbnail, took me a few seconds to realize that it’s Sarah! Looking forward to the next installment.
it's a good thing I'm the most overwhelming phone nerd ever :3
I often wonder how a presumably CIS man seems to know more trans women than me (a trans woman). I am clearly hanging out in the wrong places.
1. Gender is weird, I am not totally sure what I am but most of my loved ones drop me somewhere in the queer bucket for various reasons
2. The majority of my closest friends and loved ones are either trans or gender nonconforming 💚
Right? I mean, where are all the cute geeky girls to nerd out with? They're all over there (as in, nowhere near here.)
Growing up in the early 2000s, I remember watching a documentary on phone phreaking and wanted to build a bluebox so bad, ever since I was super interested in phones. Thanks for this Dev!
Duuude! Sarah and you together! Love it brother! Cueing up here at an old CO. Thank you for the upload!
What would the world be like without the nerds?! 😂
Greetings from Stockholm Sweden Europe 🇺🇸🇸🇪♥️
When the world slips you a Geoffrey, stroke the furry wall
edit: Not a hyper phone nerd. I'm a hyper whatever-the-hell-sounds-interesting-today nerd. Why yes, I DO watch Technology Connections.
The phrase I use for myself is "broad-spectrum geek."
And yep, me too.
@@adamengelhart5159 SO stealing that!
Deviant could totally have fixed the telephone through the refrigeration cycle and the magic of buying two of them!
@@phillyphakename1255Alec?
Well, it's not exactly _buying_ two of them, but since they're going to replace the insides with those of a working phone from the museum's stash . . .
The Connections museum is a fucking treasure. It's like the ultimate phone geek HQ. Everyone there is just so into phone stuff, and so excited to to explain the equipment to people, no matter how obscure the thing they have is someone there will know everything about it. It's a true gem and something rare in today's world. I encourage anyone who is a geek or geek adjacent to visit it if they are in Seattle. And don't cheap out at the donation box.
I love the ending and talking about troubleshooting. So much in troubleshooting anything eventually involves. Your normal problem children issues and then your easy to trouble shoot while your there problems. Like 95% or more of the problems I troubleshoot are resolved by step 5 of things I check out of Habbit and not bother looking up that specific problem.
I'm a simple person; I see a title like that and I'm all OK DOING THE CLICKY NOW THX :-D
hahah, gotcha =)
Look around a little bit and discover one of the most elaborate practical jokes, ever, hiding in plain sight! I am in love with this collaboration, there is so much great content here all ROLLED into one fascinating video.
oh now i'm wondering which joke you found =)
I adore pay phones and am happy to learn more about them.
A note on what you said about the troubleshooting being most of the repair. As a locksmith who's mostly industrial and commercial these days I don't do a LOT of residential, but I'll still take those calls and over the years I've figured out how to walk customers through some basic troubleshooting over the phone so either 1. It's an issue the customer doesn't even NEED me for, because they can do it themselves with a screwdriver 2. I have a REALLY good idea of what I'm gonna be dealing with and can give them a "It appears to be X problem, if it is, this is the estimate", or 3. I'm still completely befuddled and now it's something I NEED to figure out.
Sarah is awesome! I love the explanations all the way through, even as the phone was being difficult and the next steps weren't always clear.
i'm confident we'll get it working soon, for sure!
The big white sticker with 6 - 11 staring you right in the face... coincidence? lol
Bless all those who have decades old phone parts in storage ☺
💯
That place looks magical! I definitely want to check it out next time I'm in Seattle.
I’ve never been to Seattle, but that museum has been on my bucket list for a couple of years now. And I am already subscribed to their channel.
Thanks for the crossover!
I'm not a phone nerd, but i am an electronics geek, so i'll happily watch this. though if the old phreaking was still around, i'd probably be doing it.
Okay, I seem to be a hyper phone nerd! The Connections Museum and DeviantOllam in one video is also a bonus. Like to see part 2!
You and Sarah on the same video - I guess I AM a hyper phone nerd! She is the best!
What a delight! I found the connections museum RUclips channel last year and I'm fascinated by the work they do, so this colab is awesome! I'm so looking forward to part 2
So many memories, you're actually covering a topic I'm super familiar with having "experimented" with phones especially payphones since around 1994, and 10 years in telecom starting around 2002 - Just small steps in my journey - I'm more computers and servers now.
Wow, trip down memory lane and a very enjoyable one at that, thank you so much!
Great folks over at the connections museum. You can spend HOURS there and still not learn even a quarter of the knowledge they have. Always a fun trip to make.
How did I do so much phreaking in the 1980s and yet I was today years old when I heard about the Connections Museum? Added to the bucket list!
I may not be a meganerd, but the gothy danish antique that lives on the dresser behind me (and even occasionally gets plugged into a bluetooth adapter) has to count for something. XD
yes, i totally use an adapter like that for my phones, too!
What you were doing reminds me a lot of the old school phone hacking that I used to do ( back in the day). Nice to see the old manuals being used- still . Plus you gave me a new bucket list destination. Great video Dev.
That expertise on display was so cool to watch!
i'm generally in awe of her and the museum team, yeah!
Sarah and Deve!!!! What. A. Collab!!! 2025 needs to work HARD to improve on this!!!
Such an amazing crossover! love Sarah and Connections Museum!
I love her, too! 😊👍💚
Extremely niche oldschool tech?!? Count me in!
When I went to work at the local Telco in 1996, I started on payphones. Could probably still service them if I had to. Lol.
Really looking forward to seeing part 2, seeing two of my favourite hackers collaborating on something so cool. To be fair, I've never stopped being a phreak, so phone stuff like this is candy to me.
Didn’t realise I was a phone nerd until I watched this, pretty interesting stuff, hopefully you do a part 2 follow up on getting it working 🤞
Great video. Awesome to see the respect you two have for each other, seems like a fantastic relationship. I'm invested to see how this phone ends up getting fixed!
I wish I knew the museum was there when I was in Seattle
But this crossover has made my day.
Looking forward to seeing the phone coming back
I see Sarah in a video thumbnail and I click on it :D Despite 40 years in server and big iron programming/maintenance I wasn't a phone geek until lockdown, all down to the Connections Museum videos.
Not particularly a phone nerd, but Sarah is awesome, and i love a good colab. Really enjoyed this.
Today is a good day! Two of my favorite creators/nerds in one video!!!
So I guess I'm a hyper phone nerd! Good. Thanks for sharing this
It's always fascinating watching someone comfortable and experienced with an electronic/mechanism. It always seems almost violent the way they manipulate parts. With no experience I'd be so slow and dainty in my manipulations :).
This triggered so many memories of working on arcade and pinball machines in the early 00s
Nice to see you hanging out at the Connections Museum, one of my favorite channels!
I never miss an upload with them, for sure!
Sarah was an absolute delight - looking forward to the follow-up video.
i love her so much 😊
Never thought I'd see Sarah respond with a shake of the head and "Phones! :(" ;)
13:40 I see what you did there, Dev 😂
There are probably words for how excited I am to see Conectios Sarah and the interwebs Dev fixing a pay phone, but I'm far too twiterpated with excitement to find thoes words
happy to make your day such a delight!
"most of us have stories [where we should have tried the easy shit first]" yeah... guilty as charged.
At least we mostly learned from that and now actually plug stuff in...
That's one of my favorite places too :) i haven't been in many many years but I'm so glad they're still going!
Haha weird to see how small the world is with Deav at a place I've been, working with people I've met and using names I recognize. I've gotta see about coming through to the connections museum again. A lot of fun the first time I went.
So glad you've been there, I love it so much at the museum!
18:25 '...swap-out the guts', Things you say that make non-tech nerds look at you funny.
I love using 'guts' when referring to electronics builds/projects; that and to, 'cannibalize' something for parts is another goodie ;P
Depot level repair is super common in telecom, have a field tech troubleshoot and swap a module or a whole box, take it back to the shop, put a bunch into a box and ship em to a repair facility.
It means that repair techs can specialize, get to know the schematics for a few models, common fails, etc. When I did 4g cell tower radios, I could troubleshoot ~75% of problems with about 8 multimeter measurements. 12 layer boards, 12x15 inches.
Anyways, you are probably running into the issue that schematics and repair manuals can be limited to the repair depots, not widely distributed for field techs. Great for business and productivity, not great for conservation.
I don't think there is a better thumbnail you could craft to get me to click on a video faster. Two of my favourite niche content creators doing a crossover episode!
Ha! Never thought you were friends with Sarah the Switch Witch! Lovely :)
oh my yes! She and I see each other almost weekly in Seattle and yes I am enchanted by her, through and through
Wild. I hadn't come across your channel before, but this just popped up on my RUclips home page. We were actually on the same tour with Sarah back in May.
Fine, I re-open my own payphone and start working on fixing it again.
I love the custom inlay right before 14:00! Really should call my mother...
Still excited that I have the same rainbow glasses. So many compliments on them day to day. I am trans and whenever anyone says they like my glasses I am like "thanks! I have to show I am gay somehow."
That looks like a pretty standard late ‘70s board. What is great about the single slot body is that everything is modular and easy to swap. I got a really sweet super clean Pac Bell phone with T-handle, security keys and mounting frame from eBay which was apparently cabbaged up by Pac Bell to work like an extension phone. The vault was missing, and they had cut the 1A relay and put a cable tie through the armature so it just rejected coins to the chute. What a mess! I found a place called Triad in Youngstown, Ohio that has just about any pay phone or COCOT part you could want for very reasonable prices. I got a new 1A relay and newer DIP switch programmable totalizer, electronic coin rejecter, vault and a few cosmetic parts. I put everything back to spec and set it up as dial tone first. If someone puts coins in, they’ll hear the beeps from the totalizer, but the coins will sit in the 1A hopper. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a coin exchange simulator with an Arduino and a 60 volt supply to operate the relay. I’ve also got a very nice chrome Northern Electric 3-slot coin first which has a Cincinnati, Ohio exchange on the dial card. The 3-slot requires an external subset to supply the network and ringer. I found a brand new in box subset on eBay. It is pretty easy to bridge a couple contacts on the 1A relay to just make the talk path live all the time and use it as an extension phone. Triad has advanced boards if you want to turn your single slot pay phone into a COCOT. You can set local call rate as well as rate tables and local timers for long distance calls, if you want. I kept my original board, but I suspect the sound quality on newer boards is better because they have better networks.
I found having a Station Services Specialty Manual is a must to de-cabbage eBay finds and put them back to normal spec. There are so many which are all hacked up by people who don’t know what they’re doing. The Station Services Specialty Manual is really a condensation of Bell System Practices relevant to customer premise equipment and suitable for carrying by installers. The different RBOCs apparently had their own flavors of the manual. I have one from Pac Bell which is as thick as a large metro area phone book which I found on Amazon for a few bucks. I’ve also got one from Oregon Bell supplied back in the day by a helpful family member and it is much smaller and less detailed. If you can find the Pac Bell version, grab it.
As someone who got my start in corporate IT working for a CLEC over 2 decades ago and used to spend a lot of time leaning up against the cabinets of a 5ESS or a DMS500 while working on my equipment, LOVE that there's somewhere that is keeping some of this tech alive. Absolutely added to the "must visit" list if I'm ever in Seattle with a free day.
Though you may need to start a glossary post for anybody under 30. Explain what a payphone is first, then what a COCOT is, then why they look like they're armored.
😀
And we're going to measure this voltage twice, to make sure that it's not a fluke.
[ looks ]
It's not.
Love the custom label!
That was fun to make, yes. =)
Hooray two of my favorite internet people doing a colab.
I saw Sarah in the thumbnail and stopped scrolling! 😅
OLD SCHOOL video.... wow. Worked for a telco YEARS ago and brought back many memories. Nice content.
Damn it. Now I want a payphone.
There better be a series of videos showing off various phreaking boxes in collaboration with Connections Museum with this!
The last payphone I came across was in Topaz Lake on the Cali/Neva border. It had no dialtone because it was in fact a cellular device disguised as a payphone. One lifts the receiver, dials the number and press the extra button on the keypad at which time the handset would tell you how much money to drop in the phone or instruct you how to swipe a credit card in the slot. Your call is only connected upon receipt of the money so you cant do collect "we had a baby its a boy" calls like the old days.
That is a pretty phone you got there, glad you want to save them!
Have fun rebuilding it.
I love that, try low hanging fruit first.
Also, side note, about the museum, is it wheelchair accessible? Because I would love to take a trip to go see it, especially cause it’s only a couple hours away.
Yes, there is a ramp from the parking lot to the vestibule, there's an elevator up to the second and third floors, and the floors themselves are navigable in many places with a wheelchair. Some spots on the tour are a bit tight and might be a challenge because I don't think they are a full 36 in wide, but you would definitely be able to see quite a bit.
This video is 100% my jam. Always wanted a payphone. Still do.
hey i know this person!
awesome, hell yeah - also deviant - you seem happy with your "new" cozy wall!
Sarah & the Connections Museum are always interesting!
well worth the watch just to hear the terms tip and ring again alone :)
Hyper phone nerd checking in
📞😊☎️
1:40 Oh, hey, cool, I’ve seen their channel- yay more entertaining nerds!
Not everything is about getting something fixed. Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.