my life with computers or how i got my first cellphone and how everything went downhill from there - part 3

now, back then when the old times where just called times, people used to had landlines

just phones wired to the wall, the concept is pretty simple, it made access to someone easy, i guess that's why they made phones when john phone invented it.

it's also very funny how many people from my generation is into phones/phone systems yet they are the same people that also don't answer calls when they get one on their cellphones now a days, i guess generational trauma.

(the telefonica alerce, one of the firsts phones i remember seeing at home)

Anyways, i digress, so when i was growing up in the mid to late 90s, and more when i started remembering things, in the early 2000s, i played a lot with the phone at home, i assumed that because normal calls used only numbers, maybe special system things would use the hash or asterisk

and yeah, sometimes they did, *1234 *0000 #1234 #0000 sometimes landed in echo systems, voicemails, calls where more than two people could talk at the same time, i guess they called these party lines, some phones even called you back.

my favorite was calling numbers for other cities, or even international before they blocked me from doing that

You could hear noises, springs, lines jumping around, tactile switches clicking your call around, relays from some system who knows where in a fucking crusty latin american phone company backend, idk, the noises and everything was fascinating to me.

promptly, i was phone banned at home, because i sometimes hogged the phone for you know, actual calls.

(two of the most common payphones i used to fuck around with, the one from entel was pretty hard to fuck up, they had a lot of tamper checks, and more importantly, you couldn't inject dtmf tones because if you listened careful, the phone dialed while it played a voice message, the one from CTC, then telefonica where tanks, some had the card slot, we used those calling cards a lot, i remember some of them accepting credit cards, but never saw that working.).

Anyways, i moved on to payphones, no calls to hog, except for people waiting you, but yeah, payphones where way better in the noise department, like first of all some phones did some funky noises under the beginning of the call, probably some fsk sending some info around, like did this mf actually paid or not?

well, some phones allowed you to shove a tissue paper or something on the coin return thing, wait the whole day, collect what people lost, that was called stealing, not saying i ever did it, but i used to check for that, because sometimes, you would stumble into some cashi cashi, sometimes just shoving a coin and pressing return would get you more cash because who knows, maybe something got stuck there.

(Manquehue phone, pretty easy to fuck with, also free cash... "easy money" as the twink from terminator would say).

Probably in the early 2000s, i saw my first "smart pay phone" it had a little screen and a metalic qwerty phone, for a nerd kid like me, that was like wtf, i need to use it, i ran to my aunt, asked for coins and ran back to the phone...

(probably not the same phone but looked like this.)

inserted like who knows, 500 pesos or so for like 5 mins of internet, the thing screen flashed, loaded netscape and then proceeded to kernel panic... phones huh.

i looked that fucker in despair, then anger, then slammed the headset on the keyboard and went back to my life.

the good thing about living in an old crusty city was that old phones where in some random places, there were a couple with the rotary dial, making call with those kind of phones was really really easy, just tap the pulses, the old one with rotary dial just called, i think internally locked the pulses from the dial wheel but not from the thing itself.

(the one with a rotary dial)

the one with keypad had better security features.

(Cocrodile clips and a krone test lead)

One of my favorite hacks from my era of phones, was the crocodrile clips with a trimline phone, phone infrastructure was shit, same with installs, so you had access to phone lines randomly if walked outside an office or in school, behind the offices you could hear calls and better yet, make them.

this in my late years moved to the computer with clip leads, the powerbook had a working battery for a while and it had a modem, so of course, sometimes i would sit close to a line (or a opened payphone) and would make short internet browsing sessions in the mid 2000s with the already obsolete powerbook and stolen phone lines, it was fun, got caught way more than i should have.

My first love - Cellphones

so when i was like 7 or so, my bio dad found a random cellphone in the bus or something, and he gave it to me, it was a general electric branded ericsson brick, it had charge but my dad didn't care about it, he gave it to me as a toy.

(this one but it had the GE logo, a thing some manufacturers did, rebrand already existing phones from Ericsson, Nokia and the most common i saw was the motorolas, pretty easy to spot as a nerd phone kid)

i got a call from the owner "devuelve la cagá conchesumare" i was a kid i didn't care about that, and i called my mom, that was in a party that night, she was like where are you calling me from, and i was like "from a cellphone"

nothing much happened, i probably used it as a toy in the shower and then it died.

then life happened, in 1998 we moved from santiago to copiapo, the city where my mom was going to study and where she had her family, our family.

My mom in that era had a nokia 918 (the amps variant), was the "house phone" but she carried it, what a beautiful brick was that phone.

(a nokia 918 phone)

that phone powered by showing the phone number, it said 730 and then the phone number itself, i was curious about what was that 730, i promptly stopped caring because kid life took over, but not without pressing keys and dialing every single combination possible, stumbling over random services or dialback stuff, and i vividly remember one that asked you to press 1, press 2, press 3, etc and then it said something like "test ok" and hang up.

Some years later, i was constantly traveling alone between copiapo and santiago to see my grandparents, and they decided it was time for me to get a phone, so with my bio dad we went to a flea market that was known for having old (even for that era) phones.

(the Motorola UltraTAC 700A probably, it could have been a micro digital m70 idk, they all looked the same.)

and holy fuck it did, my bio dad was one of those parents kinda missing from the picture, he cared about me, but eh i guess, he did got me the phone though, so that was something, guy was way too cool to be a dad at like 20 or so back then lol.

deflection of traumas aside, i saw tons of phones, beautiful things from the 80s, carphones, bricks, fancy stuff like the startacs, or beautiful led motorola phones, i choose one of those, but my bio dad was like nope, get something newer, so whatever, i choose the one with the boring lcd.

So that phone arrived to my hands, and well it didn't work, i mean it powered on, got service signal bars but no calls because it was deactivated.

We took the phone to bellsouth, one of the single providers of that era that activated prepaid amps cellphone without asking where you got the phone from, i think the other "bigger" providers just sold their own devices or used sim cards (entel) so bellsouth it is.

we got the phone activated, waited the 24 or 48 hours and bam, i had my own activated prepaid phone, my grandma gave me a 10000 clp calling card and i went back to copiapo.

So the curiosity about this phone itself was that it was supposed to be "digital" tdma and D-amps, but, i don't think that it was even a thing here, those fancy digital features never worked, like messages, so probably the phone just did analog all the way.

the first hurdle of that phone was that while we had service in copiapo, nobody sold the prepaid cards, so we found the hack of getting my grandma to buy me one and read me the numbers over the phone, that worked for a while.

the phone roamed in AMPS in copiapo, i remember the small triangle logo on the screen, it worked fine though.

Cellphone calls and stuff were weird back then, like if you received a call you had to pay, less than calling but still, they charged for it, this changed with a thing called "el que llama paga" iirc they also charged for the voicemail and of course, making calls was expensive af, we had specific moments that the phone showed "FREE CALLS" a perk of the provider, that allowed to make calls for free, i used this and the cards she sent to call my grandma.

I was the first kid at school with a phone, mind you this was the late 90s, early 2000s, not even the teachers had phones hah, weird shit back then.

so, i still have burned the noises of the AMPS network, the metallic voices, the digital static sounds, the fssshhhh sound while changing cells and the dead zones between copiapo and santiago, there were so much zones where you had no signal for kilometers.

anyways, that phone introduced me in the era of curiosity for cellphone networks, i remember experimenting with the Entel phones, that had that fancy weird thing called sim card, the registration was tied to that bit of plastic and not the brick itself, i guess that by default made it secure back then (not so much anymore i guess, and it's funny now that we are moving to esim, embedded on the phone, history is cyclical)

Buy my heart was with AMPS, time moved on and so the phones, that motorola phone failed at some point and we kept using the Nokia, my mom then moved to a newer nokia, probably the tdma-amps version of the 5190 or something like that, it had snake! and a watch, and fancy ringtones that makes you wanna dance more than answer the call, not polyphony, but still, music and not only the business serious ringer the motos had.

Anyways, the sucky thing about phones was the entry price, while AMPS was slowly dying, TDMA was telefonica chile swiss army knife and entel was doing just fine with GSM, AMPS was there, powering alarm systems, car phones and kids old phones.

So i got into a music school, music in that specific point of my life was just a thing i wanted to consume, not do, but hey there i was, playing the trumpet lol

anyways a classmate had an old ericsson phone, not activated, but powering on, he sold it to me for like 3 bucks, of course he did, that was a lot of money for a kid, i paid for it anyways, and walked to the small bellsouth store in copiapo (i still remember where it was, a small corner store that was between ohiggins and vallejo street), iirc this was like in 2003 or so, idk, i was like hey i have this phone, can you activate it?

(photo of google maps with the store, when bellsouth died, this place became a dental clinic, then the clinic itself died too lol, iirc it's closed to this day, had infinite money i would open a phone museum there)

the lady was like hmmmm yeah sure, and so a 13yo kid activated a prepaid cellphone that day, they didn't care. She pulled a massive book with programming codes, gold for a kid like me, she walked away, i looked over it, she returned, ericsson programming mode, she wrote some stuff on her fancy terminal and then she gave me my new phone number "48 hours and you will get free top ups for 3 months"

fuck, my own phone... again and it worked, i unlocked the key to free calls and stuff.

that programming book opened my eyes, like fuck, you have secret codes and stuff, i need to find out more.

So to the internet we go, and after i stared for like 30 mins on the vast world that the "super information highway" was, found a site called "hack canada" that talked about cellphone hacking, way over my head, way over my basic understanding of english in that era.

then i found "the motorola bible" and that was it, you can listen to calls using programming modes? scan frequencies? esn clonning? free calls? illegal shit? sign me in. I saved that txt on a floppy disk and went home, i spent days eating that thing on the home computer.

next objective, motorola phones.

Then they started releasing cheap but feature phones, like first fun phones that actually attracted my generation, camera phones, color screen, games, the nokia pc suite, infrarred sending tones and stuff to your friends was a whole cultural thing, and not a minor one, that's how you made friends, that's how you discovered music, by listening to SKA-P recorded from the radio in the crusty AMR codec phones recorded audio in that era.

(two phones from that era sending shit over infrared)

So, cheap 30k cellphones that you can even get in small installments on the home phone bill, everyone got phones then, great, that makes the old dying phones for a even older dying network cheaper!

so i saved more lunch money and more bus fares to visit the flea markets, or ferias, the weekends.

and there was one specially, the sundays, that always had weird stuff, sometimes we would get cds, the latests pirated albums, or when we had the computer, games, the already cracked cd with the sims for example.

but then i noticed the things, and i started going alone to the flea markets, no longer limitations by my parents "why are you getting crap" and then.. i see it

a box, full of motorola microtac phones, there were like 4 or 5, chargers, batteries, even a car handsfree kit.

5 bucks all

i get it.

one of the phones got disassembled mostly immediately, i needed to see the insides, the display, the motherboard, the computer side of the phone and the rf side of the phone, and motorola made it pretty easy to understand, and i guess the era made it too, because the pcb had indications of what was everything, the RF, radio frequency, so this is the radio, the RF AMP, idk, cool stuff. i destroyed that phone in the name of science.

the other ones became my network playground, this was in late 2004 or so, so the network was actiive, still running, but probably at this point less controlled than before, less cared for "why would you be using one of those bricks when you can use the nice pretty candy bar all the brands are selling now?"

i powered one of the phones, and got signal, roaming, i called my "modern" nokia and i got an voice message, something along the lines of

"Please enter the card number"

i typed random digits and then

"enter validation code" i also fucked around for a while, for hours, swapping batteries when they died, and at some point, i noticed that if i called 0, i would get an operator, like a live person

and i was like, huh that's interesting, i told the lady, hey can you route a call for me? i'm having problems calling

and she was like, you sound like a kid, nice try and hang up.

i tried again, hoping someone else was gonna pick up, nope, same person, same "stop bothering me" reply

i tried once more, she was annoyed, but i didn't care, i started pressing keys, and when i got to 9, i was dropped into a dial tone

then, the phone, days later, got deactivated, anything i called i just got the "enter card number", never got it to go over that

but, it was an old phone, same ones they talked on the motorola bible

one wire on the middle pin of the battery later and bam, service mode

i started scanning, and at some point i heard that metalic voice sound, someone, old lady was talking to no one, i was hearing one side of the conversation, while around i could hear dtmf, noises, and others

it felt like that scene in hackers where they found the money eating virus and they enter like a weird 3d mathematical world.

that became my addiction

then i rescued a broken portable tv, it was physically damaged, but it worked, and then, i realized something, the tv picked up some phone calls too, weirder and noisier than the motorola phone scanner, but easier to use.

Here is a video i found years ago on youtube and promptly archived because it's one of the few registries from the era i could find.

i ended up modifying one of those phones with a headphone jack, two batteries in parallel, and i memorized the programming and scanning codes, listening to noises all day, recoding shit on my computer, testing those air sniffing software that supposedly captured min and esn pairs, never got that to work

but the system was there, noisy, working, but not cared for.

signal over the months became shittier, my own ericsson phone got calls from bellsouth, now telefonica asking me to get a new device because service will be going out soon, fuck no i said, i'll die on AMPS.

the amps service slowly degraded to become weird, like a lot of times calls would fail, you would get redirected to like the operator or some default messages to "Upgrade", then they moved to a thing that before any call it said "in x of x in 2006 this phone network will be discontinued and you phone will no longer work, visit www.telefonica.cl to get more information" and then dialed properly.

internally when scanning the system was noisier, was hard to get calls to stay because i guess they started disabling towers, so probably people roamed more between cells and stuff.

i will never forget those noises, so characteristic of that technology, the handoff sounds, the DTMF codes with echoes, several voices, scrambled noises, wish i had those recordings.

I was expecting this tangent to be only one part, but i guess part 4 will be the continuation of this, so stay tuned, or not, i'm not a motorola phone, closing this with a John Motorola photo with his motorlings.