Why does the phone company want to make your eardrums bleed with those first three punishing, tortuous tones? Is dialing a disconnected number really such a heinous crime?
A friend of mine who initially posed this question to me actually went so far as to call the telephone company, and they really didn’t seem to have a good answer.
Why couldn’t this message be normal, even soothing, like HAL from “2001”?
“Dave, there is a problem. The party is not answering. This is a problem. I am hereby activating missiles located in silos in North Dakota and Ukraine.”
(Oops! Wrong computer!)
Well, I heard somewhere that those tones tell a remote switch to not bill the caller in the case of a long distance call. I further heard that you can rig a gismo on your phone that sends those tones. Then anyone who calls you long distance does so for free.
Not sure if I believe it or not.
Perdabo, your answer may well have been right at one time: Phone companies did, indeed, use tones to transmit information about things like billing, and phreaks would use “blue boxes” which simulated those tones to pull a wide variety of scams on the phone companies: Free long distance, pay phones, 900 numbers, etc; causing people to be incorrectly billed, and an assortment of other nastiness. It was actually even the sound of the tones from pushing the buttons that enabled you to make phone calls at all: One of those “Kids, talk to Santa Clause” phone numbers actually told kids during the comercials to just hold the phone up to the TV, and the number would magically be dialed.
Nowadays, however, largely because of such abuses, most of the phone companies in the U.S. use more sophisticated digital means. Phreaking nowadays involves hacking into the phone company computers, and is rather less common.
… which makes me even more confused as to why we need to be punished with those three tones.
I sent this one to Cecil, but I guess it didn’t make the cut.
My WAG is that it has to do with making absolutely sure they’ve got your undivided attention while they tell you, “THIS CALL AIN’T GONNA GO THRU, SUCKA!!” If they just had a discreet little “beep”, most of the time you’d have Aunt Martha or Baby Brother or the drug dealer down the street go right on talking, oblivious of the fact that they weren’t connected. And then eventually when they do figure it out, that they’ve been standing there ranking out the collection agency, to a dead phone, they trash the phone booth.
I thought it was to tell fax machines what the following voice tells humans. Interestingly, we do not have this tone in Canada.
I remember reading somewhere that it was so loud to make it easy for machines to detect it.
I work in the the telecom business; I can ask some of the old-timers tomorrow and see what they say.
Quoth Milossarian:
Like I said, the digital methods are now used by most phone companies, but still not quite all. They want to make sure that if someone calls from Smalltown, KS that they still won’t get charged for the call. Likewise, a phreak living in that same town could still use the old methods, but small towns have few people living in them, and even fewer phreaks. As to Canada, (WAG) it’s quite possible that they mandated that all phone companies in the country switch over to the new equipment, and there’s therefore no reason to continue to support the old.
Yeah, um, call me stinky-cheeks, but the tones still cause the dial. I can dial my phone right now by making the tones with a phone pad program on my friend’s daily planner.
Hah-HAH!
–Tim
Yes Tim, DTMF tones DO still exist. They’re still used every time you dial up someone on the phone. However, a “red box”, which used to transmit the DTMF of various coins into a payphone don’t work anymore.
Similarly, virtually every Phreak-box you can find plans for are totally worthless these days, unless you live in the boons.
Phreaks have turned to harassment(online and on the phone), and creditcard fraud Etc. these days instead of stealing a $2 call.
-Sam