I'm the author of the AUDIO of this program but I didn't make this video. I now have my own UA-cam Channel "Evan Doorbell" where you'll find the audio of this program in higher quality and many, many more.
Typically the tones were produced by a motor that ran on 48VDC. At the back of the armature were copper strips with spaces between them. Carbon brushes ran along the strips producing the tones and the power to ring a telephone. it was either 20Hz or 30Hz. In areas with a lot of party lines 10 to 60 Hz was produced so you could have 12 party lines. The ring tone you heard when calling was heard at the same time the called phone was ringing. For quite a few decades now tones have been produced by electronic circuits. That's why you can sometimes pick up the phone to make a call and a caller will be there who may or may not have heard a ring tone. The old StepXStep offices used 100-120 Hz tones for dial tone and busy tone. Later as Cross Bar came into service dial tone was changed to a 600Hz tone.
On Illinois Bell in the early '70s you dialed 91911, hang up and every phone in the house rang. Great intercom system if you had a big house like we had. Dial 91918 and it would ring 3 times like in England! 91917 and it would ring continuously until you answered it! Drove my dad nuts with this one! He wasn't aware of these tricks!
Those gray cans you see just before the ringing sounds is an old telephone switch. Although I never worked on the switches I did spend a lot of time inside central offices fixing other things. Lots of noise from these switches they had a lot of relays etc. I could never quite get used to when the old switches were taken out and it became so quiet...seems like I still miss those clicking sounds of the old switch.
Evan, it's fascinating to hear how your voice has changed from 1971 to the year of this narration. Your professional voice acting skill motivates the viewer to listen more to the video.
During my time with AT&T I got to work in 7 different dept. I worked inside central offices like this...outside with cable splicers and helped maintain emergency batteries, generators etc. I remember working on the main frame and touching one of the ring generator pairs...wow you could get a pretty good shock.
Very uniquely well. I remember the off hook tones scared me as a kid. Also remember the reorder tone which wasn’t bad at all. But the Jan Barbe’s If you like to make a call messsage was like bracing for the worst kind of vehicular impact.
Fascinating. I lived in a large city and recognized mine, but had a lot of family in “the country” in Florida, Alabama and Georgia and heard many of theirs.
The amount of crosstalk coming from the old tone generators is unbelievable. I remember the one in White Plains, NY (914-761) you could hear a faint busy signal between rings.
Great video, Im in Dominican Republic and as we use NANP I remember heard many of those ringing tones and busy tones calling to diferents town here in Dominican Rep. including my hometown in the 80's where localy we dialed only 3 digits until modernity came and we passed from 3 digits to 7 digits and actually dialing 10.
I'm so old I remember when you could ask an operator to interrupt a phone call someone you wanted to reach in order to tell them to call you. The operator could also tell you if the phone number you wanted to reach was off the hook or in the midst of a phone call.
That's interesting. Where you an operator? What were you supposed to say instead? What I meant was they could tell one if the other party was talking to someone else or the busy signal was the result of the phone was off its cradle.
Coming from a background in Nortel (DMS 10 & 100), ACGS (GTD-5), and Stromberg-Carlson/Siemens (DCO), I find this all very interesting. I grew-up within several Bell System Exchanges, & have spent most of my telephony career in GTE/Verizon/Frontier Exchanges. It's rather sad how all of this is lost, upon the younger generations.
@Waterlec Although the equipment of the era, to which you're referring was more electromechanical in nature, than electronic, I believe there was still some ‘flavor’ of audio level conditioning. In essence, the telephone network employed equipment, which attempted to maintain a certain volume level, for consistency & intelligibility. When you connected the guitar amplifier’s output to the microphone leads of the telephone handset, I suspect it simply overdrove the phone, to the point of distortion. The equipment in the Central Office would have attempted to level the signal coming in, and ‘clipped’ the peaks. By the time it reached the person on the other end, they would have heard a rather loud & distorted sound on their end of the call, but a significantly lower signal, than that of which the guitar amp was producing. Just the same, I’m sure their ears were ringing, after experiencing your guitar solo via the land line. 😊
I was a phone phreak before I even knew that phone freaking existed as a sub-culture. As a child, I played with the phone frequently and found out things about telephone technology that none of the adult around me knew. I discovered how to make long-distance calls without paying for them, among other things.
@@kreuner11 I didn't have tone generator or a blue box or anything like that. What we did have was a party-line, as we lived a few miles outside of town where three or four houses shared the same telephone line. On a party-line, you would make a long-distance phone call by dialing 1+area code (if different from yours)+phone number. A live operator would break in and ask, "Your number please?" You would then give her your telephone number for billing purposes and the call would then complete (you were charged direct-dialed rates even though it required operator-assistance). In telephone technology terms, this was known as CAMA, which stands for Centralized Automatic Message Accounting (When I was about 11 years old, I started giving the operator a telephone number within our exchange that wasn't assigned to anyone and the operator, not knowing this, would still complete the call. Thus, the call got charged to a non-active telephone number. I got away with this for a long time, until the local phone company began converting rural party-lines to private lines. After this, no operator was required to obtain your billing telephone number, so I could no longer defraud like this.
I remember those rings as a kid. Living in Los Angeles, I remember the General Telephone rings were shorter, and Pacific Telephone rings longer. Also, GTE was known for crappy service, still using switching equipment from the stone age. ;)
Dial tone was changed for Touch Tone calling(DTMF). The side tones from the old Dial Tone interfered with Touch tone detection. Audible ringing in the step by step offices was produced by connecting the Ringing voltage to the ring lead of the caller side of the connector thru a capacitor. This "audible ringing" could be further modified by Digital Interoffice Trunking. With ESS switching All Tones and Ringing were provided by Service Trunk Groups. The line would be connected thru the switching to the Service TG with the desired Tones.
I correctly predicted that 1ESS introduced the modern day tones. I wonder if the modern day ring was present back in 1965 or was introduced later on (knowing that 1ESS was programmable)?
He's reading off the area code and prefix for the central office that the sounds come from. Most of his demo's seem to be either from the 516 and 212 area codes (New York), but there are some from area codes 802 (Vermont) and 901 (Tennessee).
Actually, most of Evan's tapes are of independent phone companies. He did a whole series of tapes on the Carolina Telephone Co. in eastern North Carolina. That company used mostly equipment by Automatic Electric (aka GTE, one of the companies that eventually became Verizon).
Yes, there are a few popular sites that feature these sounds and other vintage telephone memorabilia. Just go to Yahoo and search "old telephone sounds."
Officer Gregory Stevens That's the British ringback tone. I'm pretty sure it's still the same. What's also cool about that song is that there's a real AT&T phone operator dialing "Pink's" home, and you can hear the old long distance tones.
I remember hearing the ring signals when calling up someone sounding different back in the 70's and earlier. They even sounded different depending on the location back then. Now they sound similar when calling up someone in the U.S. I also remember early long distance calls & their poor connections-you had to keep the others quiet so you can hear the caller at the other end of the line. For example, there was a steady hum when talking to someone in Yugoslavia. Now long distance is easier.
Joy Bubbles (Joeseph Engressia) was offered a job because he knew the phone system more intimately than pretty much any other person, and could diagnose phone problems much more easily by listening than by having to go through and diagnose lines at a more physical level. Maybe that was common knowledge (for phone appreciators, that is), but I thought I'd share that.
When I was a kid I didn't like to talk on the phone and still don't. My family was the same way my dad put a flip switch on the phone to switch the ring off.
The “New CDO” sampled at 3:10 was the ring back tone of the central office for Scotts Hill, North Carolina 686 exchange (area code 919 back then, but now 910) when I was growing up. The busy signal sounded a little different from the one sampled here. Back then touch tone dialing was not available on that exchange. They upgraded the central office in 1984 and the dial tone, busy signal and ring back tones became the standard tones we know today. An oddity that I noticed for a few years after the upgrade was that after dialing a number, even with a touch tone telephone, you could hear MF tones being generated before the ring back on the called line started. BTW, I only recall directory assistance in area code 405 having that New CDO ring back tone.
Interesting - the New CDO was also the ring for Swannanoa, North Carolina, which also was a 686 exchange, in 704 back then (828 now). My grandparents lived up there, and their ring was New CDO, and it was doubled, left over from the old party lines, I suppose.
Evan is from Hempstead, Long Island; as this was very early in his phreaking adventures (about 14 years old in this tape) he would have poked around mostly in his local area for phone sounds at this stage. There certainly was no shortage of cool-sounding old phone switches in the greater NYC area at the time.
I live in Westchester County and I recall some of the old telephone sounds. My tones were much like those of (516) 485 until Oct. 1985. (914) 357 [Suffern, NY] once had tones like those of (802) 472. The short busy signal that (516) 593 had was also on (914) 337, (914) 779, (914) 793 and (914) 961. ESS first came to (914) 472, (914) 723, (914) 725 in Scarsdale, NY and also (914) 428, (914) 694, (914) 696, (914) 761, (914) 946, (914) 948, (914) 949 in White Plains, NY in 1972. It wasn't until the 1980s where ESS would come to the rest of Westchester County, NY and by the late 1980s all of the old telephone sounds were gone in Westchester County, NY. I still haven't forgotten what the old telephone sounds were like and it is nice to hear them once again.
+alterman156 Many of the exchanges you listed were crossbar 5 offices and never never cut to ESS. For example, in the early 80s Chappaqua went from Step by Step to DMS-100. ( first digital switch in Westchester not ESS) Tarrytown (XB5) went to DMS on Nov 15 1984. Scarsdale and Dobbs Ferry (both XB5) followed soon after. By the late 1980 all switches in Westchester went digital ( either DMS or 5E). I only listed a few of the offices I am sure of this because I worked for NY Tel as a crossbar 5 switchman in many of the exchanges you listed.
This is a great collection and the descriptions are great. I was a cord board operator back when these were the normal thing to hear. The unusual "Murray" ring at 6:30 could also be heard in Anniston, AL on what was then 205-23x, and on what I think was a 4a crossbar that served area code 219 in Indiana. I remember trying a payphone on the Murray exchange when vacationing in Miami and hearing the ring from there. Good job, and thanks for the memories!
The San Fran Bay Area was full of #5's all over the place, so I used to hear almost only #5 ringers. Oakland had a bunch of leftover Step by Step, and plenty of "City Ring" to match. The radio station 'Choke Exchange" had a modified City Ring on it (415-478), so I didn't know if it was a SXS or a #1xb. The first ESS I heard was in Oakland (415-444) in 1971? That would make sense since Oakland was a toll center.
Nowadays you dont get a busy signal, but a recording that says "This line is busy.we will continue to try this number for an additional 75 cents"Or most people have cell phones that say "The number you are trying to reach is not available...."
I'm sorry, to clarify: I meant to say that AutoElec was owned by GTE, kind of like Western Electric vis-a-vis Bell System. My point being that CTCo was definitely not Bell; the sounds were remarkably different, and in some ways more interesting. As for systems outside of the US, Evan's tapes do includes some calls overseas to places like Mexico and France. One of his most remarkable recordings is of a tiny SXS office in rural Quebec...in August 2001!
The Stromberg-Carlson XY switching system generated a rather obnoxious ringing tone that I can only describe as "BRRAAACK." You always knew it was an XY office when you heard it, the other clue being that it was almost always in a small town.
When you talk about the types of tones then you give a number like 802748 for a CBO ring, what do the numbers mean? are they recording numbers? Like when you get "Message SH23, your party as not answered your call" or somthing liuke that for example. What doe the numbers of the tones mean?
Our city had these types of rings up until the mid 90's. Sometimes, the ring would vary depending on what telephone equipment the called party had. You could almost 'hear through' the line while the call was ringing. If it was a rural location, you could also hear a distinct 'hum' on the line. Were these rings only on cross bar systems or were they also on SP (stored program) systems?
wideweb dot com slash phonetrips Evan is still alive and well, by the way. I talk to him on the phone occasionally, he's a great guy, very intelligent and a full of wisdom on a lot of subjects. I don't know if he will be putting out more phone tapes anytime soon, though; however he did recently narrate the audiobook version of a comprehensive history of the phone phreaking movement (and did a great job of it!). It's on Amazon if you're interested.
The San Fran Bay Area was full of #5's all over the place, so I used to hear almost only #5 ringers. Oakland had a bunch of leftover Step by Step, and plenty of "City Ring" to match. The radio station 'Choke Exchange" had a modified City Ring on it (415-478), so I didn't know if it was a SXS or a #1xb. The first ESS I heard was in Oakland (415-444) in 1971? That would make sense since Oakland was a toll center. I have an MF dial string as my ringtone on my cell :)
Loved #5 crossbar, they always had the larger local calling area, my town was step by step & had a shitty 5 mile radius local calling area. Most places were toll calls
Some of those rings were like what sounds come from my rear end after having one too many bean burritos. If you were going to make a video on rings today, you can finish that in 30 seconds. Everything is the same. :\
Dese dayz al u se is peeple with thoze dam sell phones up to dere ears and it disguts me 2 no end. an lissen to de ringback signul ya get wid a sell phone!!! it is a peace of crappp!
All the sounds of playing on the telephone as a kid, Anonymous crank calling of people, and they had to do nothing about it there was no caller ID. You could spend hours on the telephone. Besides you had to get your money's worth for how expensive your phone bill was back in the day. Go to someone's house bar their phone and sneakily make a long distance telephone call because you knew it was going to cost like 50 bucks. Someone you didn't like sneak into a room and make an hours worth of long distance phone calls and leave with an evil grin on your face knowing you had jacked their phone bill through the ceiling. All the days of telephone fun is gone crank calls with the heavy breathing, or the is your refrigerator running, you better go catch it all the fun has been removed from daily life including the phone fun
I'm the author of the AUDIO of this program but I didn't make this video. I now have my own UA-cam Channel "Evan Doorbell" where you'll find the audio of this program in higher quality and many, many more.
Why am i glued to videos like this?
Typically the tones were produced by a motor that ran on 48VDC. At the back of the armature were copper strips with spaces between them. Carbon brushes ran along the strips producing the tones and the power to ring a telephone. it was either 20Hz or 30Hz. In areas with a lot of party lines 10 to 60 Hz was produced so you could have 12 party lines. The ring tone you heard when calling was heard at the same time the called phone was ringing. For quite a few decades now tones have been produced by electronic circuits. That's why you can sometimes pick up the phone to make a call and a caller will be there who may or may not have heard a ring tone.
The old StepXStep offices used 100-120 Hz tones for dial tone and busy tone. Later as Cross Bar came into service dial tone was changed to a 600Hz tone.
I like how the clicks are so deep - more "clunk" than click. I love analog sounds like that.
I still like and watch this video 12 years later
Used to be able to dial your own phone number from home, hang up real fast, and your phone would ring!!!
On Illinois Bell in the early '70s you dialed 91911, hang up and every phone in the house rang. Great intercom system if you had a big house like we had. Dial 91918 and it would ring 3 times like in England! 91917 and it would ring continuously until you answered it! Drove my dad nuts with this one! He wasn't aware of these tricks!
I miss rotary phones ! Thanks for such a cool video. This brings back memories of the good ol days of telephone communication.
Those gray cans you see just before the ringing sounds is an old telephone switch. Although I never worked on the switches I did spend a lot of time inside central offices fixing other things. Lots of noise from these switches they had a lot of relays etc. I could never quite get used to when the old switches were taken out and it became so quiet...seems like I still miss those clicking sounds of the old switch.
Evan, it's fascinating to hear how your voice has changed from 1971 to the year of this narration. Your professional voice acting skill motivates the viewer to listen more to the video.
Asian Circuitry is this the same guy who does PLA?
During my time with AT&T I got to work in 7 different dept. I worked inside central offices like this...outside with cable splicers and helped maintain emergency batteries, generators etc. I remember working on the main frame and touching one of the ring generator pairs...wow you could get a pretty good shock.
Very uniquely well. I remember the off hook tones scared me as a kid. Also remember the reorder tone which wasn’t bad at all. But the Jan Barbe’s If you like to make a call messsage was like bracing for the worst kind of vehicular impact.
Fascinating. I lived in a large city and recognized mine, but had a lot of family in “the country” in Florida, Alabama and Georgia and heard many of theirs.
wow , makes me wish I could call my Gran's house in the 70s again in E. Tenn. those early sounds on rotary dial black telephones
The amount of crosstalk coming from the old tone generators is unbelievable. I remember the one in White Plains, NY (914-761) you could hear a faint busy signal between rings.
Great video, Im in Dominican Republic and as we use NANP I remember heard many of those ringing tones and busy tones calling to diferents town here in Dominican Rep. including my hometown in the 80's where localy we dialed only 3 digits until modernity came and we passed from 3 digits to 7 digits and actually dialing 10.
I think the Bell System sold their old switching systems to 3rd world countries!
I'm so old I remember when you could ask an operator to interrupt a phone call someone you wanted to reach in order to tell them to call you. The operator could also tell you if the phone number you wanted to reach was off the hook or in the midst of a phone call.
We were never allowed to say "Off the hook"
That's interesting. Where you an operator? What were you supposed to say instead? What I meant was they could tell one if the other party was talking to someone else or the busy signal was the result of the phone was off its cradle.
Coming from a background in Nortel (DMS 10 & 100), ACGS (GTD-5), and Stromberg-Carlson/Siemens (DCO), I find this all very interesting. I grew-up within several Bell System Exchanges, & have spent most of my telephony career in GTE/Verizon/Frontier Exchanges. It's rather sad how all of this is lost, upon the younger generations.
@Waterlec Although the equipment of the era, to which you're referring was more electromechanical in nature, than electronic, I believe there was still some ‘flavor’ of audio level conditioning. In essence, the telephone network employed equipment, which attempted to maintain a certain volume level, for consistency & intelligibility.
When you connected the guitar amplifier’s output to the microphone leads of the telephone handset, I suspect it simply overdrove the phone, to the point of distortion. The equipment in the Central Office would have attempted to level the signal coming in, and ‘clipped’ the peaks. By the time it reached the person on the other end, they would have heard a rather loud & distorted sound on their end of the call, but a significantly lower signal, than that of which the guitar amp was producing. Just the same, I’m sure their ears were ringing, after experiencing your guitar solo via the land line. 😊
Your neighbors would more likely hear the guitar as cross talk when using there phones.
I was a phone phreak before I even knew that phone freaking existed as a sub-culture. As a child, I played with the phone frequently and found out things about telephone technology that none of the adult around me knew. I discovered how to make long-distance calls without paying for them, among other things.
what?? you made a bluebox as a child? i call bs
You could buy a cheap tone generator from Tandy or just record tones to a cassette deck. Among over ways
@@Tangobaldy never thought of that
Phone Phreaking is actually a federal crime today. Because it is linked to espionage rings around the world.
@@kreuner11 I didn't have tone generator or a blue box or anything like that. What we did have was a party-line, as we lived a few miles outside of town where three or four houses shared the same telephone line. On a party-line, you would make a long-distance phone call by dialing 1+area code (if different from yours)+phone number. A live operator would break in and ask, "Your number please?" You would then give her your telephone number for billing purposes and the call would then complete (you were charged direct-dialed rates even though it required operator-assistance). In telephone technology terms, this was known as CAMA, which stands for Centralized Automatic Message Accounting (When I was about 11 years old, I started giving the operator a telephone number within our exchange that wasn't assigned to anyone and the operator, not knowing this, would still complete the call. Thus, the call got charged to a non-active telephone number. I got away with this for a long time, until the local phone company began converting rural party-lines to private lines. After this, no operator was required to obtain your billing telephone number, so I could no longer defraud like this.
WOW!! Thanks for posting this. Brings back a lot of memories.
I remember those rings as a kid. Living in Los Angeles, I remember the General Telephone rings were shorter, and Pacific Telephone rings longer. Also, GTE was known for crappy service, still using switching equipment from the stone age. ;)
Johnstown, PA, York, PA & Erie, PA were also GTE!
I had no idea about the flashing busy signal... COOL!
I'm so glad that in the 70's AT&T #1AESS and A.E #1 EAX used the same tones that have been the U.S standard for over 40 years
Dial tone was changed for Touch Tone calling(DTMF). The side tones from the old Dial Tone interfered with Touch tone detection. Audible ringing in the step by step offices was produced by connecting the Ringing voltage to the ring lead of the caller side of the connector thru a capacitor. This "audible ringing" could be further modified by Digital Interoffice Trunking. With ESS switching All Tones and Ringing were provided by Service Trunk Groups. The line would be connected thru the switching to the Service TG with the desired Tones.
good, someone finally put some of these on youtube.
I correctly predicted that 1ESS introduced the modern day tones. I wonder if the modern day ring was present back in 1965 or was introduced later on (knowing that 1ESS was programmable)?
It was the same in parts of Pittsburgh starting in 1975!
He's reading off the area code and prefix for the central office that the sounds come from. Most of his demo's seem to be either from the 516 and 212 area codes (New York), but there are some from area codes 802 (Vermont) and 901 (Tennessee).
Which possession of the demo were you trying to refer to but left out?
Or in jargon, NPA NXX
You have very interesting stuff I was prank call king in the 70's and remember these well.
Actually, most of Evan's tapes are of independent phone companies. He did a whole series of tapes on the Carolina Telephone Co. in eastern North Carolina. That company used mostly equipment by Automatic Electric (aka GTE, one of the companies that eventually became Verizon).
Yes, there are a few popular sites that feature these sounds and other vintage telephone memorabilia. Just go to Yahoo and search "old telephone sounds."
I like the ring tone heard on "The Wall" album by Floyd....
Officer Gregory Stevens That's the British ringback tone. I'm pretty sure it's still the same.
What's also cool about that song is that there's a real AT&T phone operator dialing "Pink's" home, and you can hear the old long distance tones.
"See he keeps hanging up. And it's a man answering"
@@centuryrox I wonder they hung up ? must be someone else besides your wife there to answer .
I remember hearing the ring signals when calling up someone sounding different back in the 70's and earlier. They even sounded different depending on the location back then. Now they sound similar when calling up someone in the U.S. I also remember early long distance calls & their poor connections-you had to keep the others quiet so you can hear the caller at the other end of the line. For example, there was a steady hum when talking to someone in Yugoslavia. Now long distance is easier.
Joy Bubbles (Joeseph Engressia) was offered a job because he knew the phone system more intimately than pretty much any other person, and could diagnose phone problems much more easily by listening than by having to go through and diagnose lines at a more physical level. Maybe that was common knowledge (for phone appreciators, that is), but I thought I'd share that.
Evan doorbell is awesome!
When I was a kid I didn't like to talk on the phone and still don't. My family was the same way my dad put a flip switch on the phone to switch the ring off.
I'm just nerdy enough to find this interesting lol
The “New CDO” sampled at 3:10 was the ring back tone of the central office for Scotts Hill, North Carolina 686 exchange (area code 919 back then, but now 910) when I was growing up. The busy signal sounded a little different from the one sampled here. Back then touch tone dialing was not available on that exchange. They upgraded the central office in 1984 and the dial tone, busy signal and ring back tones became the standard tones we know today. An oddity that I noticed for a few years after the upgrade was that after dialing a number, even with a touch tone telephone, you could hear MF tones being generated before the ring back on the called line started. BTW, I only recall directory assistance in area code 405 having that New CDO ring back tone.
Interesting - the New CDO was also the ring for Swannanoa, North Carolina, which also was a 686 exchange, in 704 back then (828 now). My grandparents lived up there, and their ring was New CDO, and it was doubled, left over from the old party lines, I suppose.
The correct designation is "Ring-Back". That's what the calling party hears in the receiver.
Evan is from Hempstead, Long Island; as this was very early in his phreaking adventures (about 14 years old in this tape) he would have poked around mostly in his local area for phone sounds at this stage. There certainly was no shortage of cool-sounding old phone switches in the greater NYC area at the time.
I live in Westchester County and I recall some of the old telephone sounds. My tones were much like those of (516) 485 until Oct. 1985. (914) 357 [Suffern, NY] once had tones like those of (802) 472. The short busy signal that (516) 593 had was also on (914) 337, (914) 779, (914) 793 and (914) 961. ESS first came to (914) 472, (914) 723, (914) 725 in Scarsdale, NY and also (914) 428, (914) 694, (914) 696, (914) 761, (914) 946, (914) 948, (914) 949 in White Plains, NY in 1972. It wasn't until the 1980s where ESS would come to the rest of Westchester County, NY and by the late 1980s all of the old telephone sounds were gone in Westchester County, NY. I still haven't forgotten what the old telephone sounds were like and it is nice to hear them once again.
+alterman156 That was before Northern came in and DOMINATED
+alterman156
Many of the exchanges you listed were crossbar 5 offices and never never cut to ESS. For example, in the early 80s Chappaqua went from Step by Step to DMS-100. ( first digital switch in Westchester not ESS) Tarrytown (XB5) went to DMS on Nov 15 1984. Scarsdale and Dobbs Ferry (both XB5) followed soon after. By the late 1980 all switches in Westchester went digital ( either DMS or 5E). I only listed a few of the offices I am sure of this because I worked for NY Tel as a crossbar 5 switchman in many of the exchanges you listed.
I lived in Putnam County. 914 area code too
This is a great collection and the descriptions are great. I was a cord board operator back when these were the normal thing to hear. The unusual "Murray" ring at 6:30 could also be heard in Anniston, AL on what was then 205-23x, and on what I think was a 4a crossbar that served area code 219 in Indiana. I remember trying a payphone on the Murray exchange when vacationing in Miami and hearing the ring from there. Good job, and thanks for the memories!
How could an Alabama tandem serve Indiana customers back then?
Absolutely fantastic stuff... Curious if he smokes...
Kansas 316 was lousy with ESS switches until digital plants were put in to work with 911 systems.
The San Fran Bay Area was full of #5's all over the place, so I used to hear almost only #5 ringers. Oakland had a bunch of leftover Step by Step, and plenty of "City Ring" to match. The radio station 'Choke Exchange" had a modified City Ring on it (415-478), so I didn't know if it was a SXS or a #1xb. The first ESS I heard was in Oakland (415-444) in 1971? That would make sense since Oakland was a toll center.
Everything sounds like a 70s sci fi movie in the 70s.
King Pin
The main website is phonetrips .dot com - MANY more of these recordings.
Wasn't there an older ring calland "gedney" ring? Do you have any videos of that?
I love them!
Good ole Evan
Nowadays you dont get a busy signal, but a recording that says "This line is busy.we will continue to try this number for an additional 75 cents"Or most people have cell phones that say "The number you are trying to reach is not available...."
what do the numbers mean that he speaks of before playing the sound.
3:52 is my favorite busy signal.
@ccronn the first 3 numbers was the area code, and the last 3 was the prefix
Wish you would let it ring a little more
That new CDO ring sounds like a fart...
I wonder if they chose busy signals to be as annoying as possible...
I'm sorry, to clarify: I meant to say that AutoElec was owned by GTE, kind of like Western Electric vis-a-vis Bell System. My point being that CTCo was definitely not Bell; the sounds were remarkably different, and in some ways more interesting. As for systems outside of the US, Evan's tapes do includes some calls overseas to places like Mexico and France. One of his most remarkable recordings is of a tiny SXS office in rural Quebec...in August 2001!
I miss rotary phones !
Lol
The Stromberg-Carlson XY switching system generated a rather obnoxious ringing tone that I can only describe as "BRRAAACK." You always knew it was an XY office when you heard it, the other clue being that it was almost always in a small town.
5:42 You definitely weren't wrong about that.
What a trip!
someone who i know who worked in the industry said the busy signal was a variation of the dial tone , please correct me if i am wrong. thanks
allan egleston Yes, in early days, the busy signal was just dial tone put on and off. Not common in 80's and virtually impossible to find today.
@@MilesCallisto At least in the US, Many countries still use electromechanical switches.
starting at 55sec .The guy talking sounds a little like Jon Lovitz from SNL
When you talk about the types of tones then you give a number like 802748 for a CBO ring, what do the numbers mean? are they recording numbers? Like when you get "Message SH23, your party as not answered your call" or somthing liuke that for example. What doe the numbers of the tones mean?
Why wasn't Evan named Phonebell? :-S
6:30 Oh God, No Mary! that must have been in the San Fran, Central Office. HA HA
Our city had these types of rings up until the mid 90's. Sometimes, the ring would vary depending on what telephone equipment the called party had. You could almost 'hear through' the line while the call was ringing. If it was a rural location, you could also hear a distinct 'hum' on the line. Were these rings only on cross bar systems or were they also on SP (stored program) systems?
wideweb dot com slash phonetrips
Evan is still alive and well, by the way. I talk to him on the phone occasionally, he's a great guy, very intelligent and a full of wisdom on a lot of subjects. I don't know if he will be putting out more phone tapes anytime soon, though; however he did recently narrate the audiobook version of a comprehensive history of the phone phreaking movement (and did a great job of it!). It's on Amazon if you're interested.
717-842, 717-457 and 717-693 prior to 1998 are cool rings too.
Maybe Evan should've been recording different sounds from... well, doorbells... instead. AWWHAWWWR.... :->
The San Fran Bay Area was full of #5's all over the place, so I used to hear almost only #5 ringers. Oakland had a bunch of leftover Step by Step, and plenty of "City Ring" to match. The radio station 'Choke Exchange" had a modified City Ring on it (415-478), so I didn't know if it was a SXS or a #1xb. The first ESS I heard was in Oakland (415-444) in 1971? That would make sense since Oakland was a toll center. I have an MF dial string as my ringtone on my cell :)
I thought SF and Oakland evolved from panel and crossbar, not step. Were there step offices also, and if so, where were they?
Loved #5 crossbar, they always had the larger local calling area, my town was step by step & had a shitty 5 mile radius local calling area. Most places were toll calls
are there any recordings of the old dial tones?
Evidently at least in the beginning, the busy signals were just the dial tone broken up.
i believe 3:10 is one of the first, if not the first, ring signal in the us, used in the 2Os and 3Os
516-379 sounds like the ring tone you hear today also
Can you do videos of receiver Off hook tones, please? Thank you.
@steviebboy69 yeah, i remember that when i called david jones store in sydney once...it is a cool ring tone...
The new cdo ring @3:10 sounds like a fart.
cool
What are the numbers he's reading off?
Ryan Becker I'm pretty sure they're the identifying/standardized codes for each type of ring.
Ryan Becker he is saying the area code and prefix.
the price of the phone company dialing the busy number for you until they get thru is $2.00 . Highway robbery if you ask me.
Cooler
2:52 - ?? Either your recording speed went down by a couple percent, or your playback speed went up a couple percent.
Haven't heard the "cry baby" yet in any of these recordings.
At 5min 48sec.Thats the ring I hear most in 2012.
Some of those rings were like what sounds come from my rear end after having one too many bean burritos. If you were going to make a video on rings today, you can finish that in 30 seconds. Everything is the same. :\
i remember that one from park grubbs calls okies
Some people now have annoying music you have to listen to ,instead of rings
7:17 farting ring lol
*sixty freaking seven
3:10 I used to call that the farting ring
Imperial, PA & Oakdale, PA had it
Dese dayz al u se is peeple with thoze dam sell phones up to dere ears and it disguts me 2 no end. an lissen to de ringback signul ya get wid a sell phone!!! it is a peace of crappp!
Did Evan get arrested for recording rings and busy signals?
MrJacMac1986 why would he?
@@Legend813a for phone tapping
People cant prank anymore because of caller ID
i dont get any difference lol
All the sounds of playing on the telephone as a kid, Anonymous crank calling of people, and they had to do nothing about it there was no caller ID. You could spend hours on the telephone. Besides you had to get your money's worth for how expensive your phone bill was back in the day. Go to someone's house bar their phone and sneakily make a long distance telephone call because you knew it was going to cost like 50 bucks. Someone you didn't like sneak into a room and make an hours worth of long distance phone calls and leave with an evil grin on your face knowing you had jacked their phone bill through the ceiling. All the days of telephone fun is gone crank calls with the heavy breathing, or the is your refrigerator running, you better go catch it all the fun has been removed from daily life including the phone fun