Does anyone know anything about this or ever done or experienced it? What was going on with what I describe?
In the late 70’s, there was about a month when something odd happened to our telephones. I was only about 12 when this happened but remember it very well… partly because I did it a good bit that month!
Back then, where I lived, every little community had its own telephone prefix and if you called outside of that little area was long distance and charges were high. The small town I lived in had a population of about 7,000 then. During this short time period, if you dialed a local number that didn’t exist, ( which seemed pretty easy to do ) and just hung on you would get connected to a “limbo area”, where you could talk to other people who had done the same thing.
Multiple people, almost always other kids, would / could all be there together, and some voices could be quite clear while some would sound quite distant and have what seemed to be different accents. Some voices would be so faint that you would have trouble making out what they were saying. It was similar to a big open unintentional /accidental chat area.
Most everyone in the “limbo area” was other kids and were really secretive about who they were or where they were at. We all seemed to think that we were going to get in trouble for hacking the phone company!
A couple of friends and I experimented to see if we could all be in there together… but we would always seem to end up in separate limbo areas. I never was about to talk to anyone in there that I knew although lots of kids in my town were talking about it. The general consensus was that no one had figured out how to get all their friends into the same area…and of course there were rumors that the phone company was tracing and prosecuting kids for hacking their phone lines. One day about a month after it started working that way it just all stopped working.
I’ve never heard of telephone limbo, but it’s a great premise for a story. You start talking to the other kids in limbo and they tell you their addresses and friends’ names. The addresses and other descriptions of the town all jibe but not the people. Every kid in limbo is speaking from a different reality!
“Limbo” is a word that I just now made up to describe it. We didn’t seem to have a good word for it.
Most everyone out there would NOT tell who they were… Nor would I to them. We all thought we were doing something illegal.
I never heard “foreign” voices… but often heard northern or western sounding kids while I was in Alabama! And usually those odd sounding voices had a poor connection, or it sounded that way to me. I guess I likely did to them too… We’d spend most of our conversation repeating back and forth to each other to make sure we were understanding.
Party line. They did away with them back in the late sixties in my area but every once in a while they “seemed” to come back. Most likely while the THE phone company was updating their equipment. I recall it happening right before we move out of a very small town into a larger “almost” city and never had it happen again.
I forget what the number was (211?), but yeah, in San Jose you could call and get hooked into a party line of sorts. People would shout out their phone numbers and if the voice was appealing, you could call and take it from there.
I experienced something slightly similar once or twice in the late 70s or 80s. I don’t remember misdialing — I think I was connected to the “limbo” as soon as I picked up the phone intending to dial.
Except what I heard was may not have been your “limbo.” It seemed to be an ordinary conversation between two people. After a short while I cleared my throat and said “Hello.” Immediately after speaking I heard some ring tones, was hung up on, and heard an ordinary dial-tone. IIRC party-lines were long since out of use.
Something that happened with some old central office switches - if you got busy tone, you could talk over the busy signal to everybody else that was connected to busy tone in the same central office. Basically, the switch connected everybody that was busy to a single slot that had the tone on it. While I was working for Bell Labs in Denver, there was a news item once about the local kids discovering the “teen line” - they’d all do something to get a busy signal and chatter to each other over the busy tone. It didn’t bother any of the phone company management, and they were well aware that it would stop happening once they upgraded to new equipment anyway. One wild guess might be that you were all being connected together to the appropriate “no such number” recording or tone and the recording or tone source simply wasn’t functioning.
Surely you are talking about “loops” and “bridges” used by The Telephone Company for testing purposes. For instance, one person calls one number, another calls a related number, and they will be connected. Of course, if you were using diverters and illegally running up some business’s phone bill, that would attract negative attention from the company.
As for the Internet, if you were connecting during the 1970s via your PDP-11 or whatever I’m sure you would have known what you were doing and wouldn’t need to ask. There were not that many nodes, and no live VOIP chat.
From Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone: “As early as 1964 teenagers had begun to discover an interesting quirk of the telephone system. Certain telephone exchanges in some areas of the country, notably Los Angeles and San Jose, had busy signals [and non-working number messages] that were shared among all callers. If you or I both happened to call busy numbers in [area codes] 408-291 we would be connected, faintly, over the busy signal–along with anyone else who happened to have called a busy number at that moment.” I also read, many years ago, that in some cases the more people who called the number, the fainter the busy signal or recorded message became, so it was easier to talk. (If I understand correctly, “loops” were limited to two-person conversations).
Had a similar thing happen in 1984 trying to get Springsteen tickets.
My roommate went to get in line, and I was in charge of trying to get them over the phone.
Dial. Busy. Dial. Busy. Dial. Busy. Dial (thank heavens for a fancy phone with a redial button). Busy. Many more repeats . . .
Dial. Person!! “I need 4 tickets to Springsteen.” “No, I need 4 tickets to Springsteen.” Apparently, the central office was overloaded to such an extent that we got cross-connected instead of the busy signal.
Never did get through for real, but the roommate managed to score the tickets. Great show.
I don’t think you made up the word “limbo”. Apart from being a West Indies dance in the 1950’s, Shakespeare used it in the 1600’s to describe being on the edge of Hell.
As far as the OP is concerned, it sounds like you found yourself in a free experimental version of 900 chat rooms, that eventually you had to pay to be a part of.
Surely that isn’t what he meant. He didn’t just now make up the word. He’s saying they didn’t have a word for it at the time, so he just now used an existing word to describe. We call this a metaphor.
I remember all kinds of weird shit you could do on the phone in the seventies. I don’t remember the OP’s trick though.
I remember there was a number you could call. As soon as the other side picked up, it would hang up on you and call you back.
I remember another number you could call, and when you picked up, all you could hear were fireworks going off.
Oh, god, you just made me remember calling a number in the 80s to hear the time. My parents would send me in the house to go call the number and see what time it was. Why the hell didn’t we have a clock in the house?? Was this normal? It must have been normal enough for there to be a phone service that didn’t nothing but tell you the time (and I think weather, maybe). WTF!??
