TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Urban Legend or Never Before Heard of Truth?

Urban Legend or Never Before Heard of Truth?

Dear Mr. Professor, the Exalted One, Pat Townson:

In the mid 90s I was an active reader of the Digest and my association
still shows in many Google searches [I worked for Digital Equipment at
the time]. VAXclusters with food nodes SNAX etc.

On of the Portland radio folk today mentioned the early 90s and 900
numbers in his show today. His claim was some television advertisers
would encourage you to hold the handset to the phone and the broadcast
the tones and actually dial the 900 number.

Do I just not remember this or was it never real? I check SNOPES and
didn't see a reference. Telcomm has so many references, thankfully. I
figured I'd go to the Master!

Howard Pierpont
Retired DEC/Intel
Hillsboro OR

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, dialing a phone number
*accoustically* is certainly sometimes possible; consider the man with
his whistle who blew certain tones into the phone to confuse the
central office circuitry, or the man who could whistle those tones
into the phone. How reliable that method of 'dialing' is I do not
know, but if your question is was this a way to defraud telco (at
least where 900 numbers and blocks against them was concerned) the
answer is no, it was not. If a phone was otherwise equipped to 'dial'
a 900 number (many phones have blocks on them against dialing a
premium charge number; I know my phones are fixed that way), then
whether the tone was 'heard' by the central office via the dial pad
on the phone itself or from input via the receiver, central would
either accept the request or not. Central does not care if you are a
damn fool with a sex hotline or whatever, just that you pay the bill.

This was not the case for the supervisory tones however; they had to
be blown into the phone or sent from some external device since telco
does not equip your phone with those 'special tones' they use
internally. To answer your question, yes I think I heard of that
method of dialing also, many, many years ago. PAT]

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