I have a few big boxes of computer crap that I haven’t been able to part with. (because you never know when a ZIP drive will come in handy) The other night I was rummaging through one of these boxes and stumbled upon my Radioshack pocket tone dialer modified with a 6.5536mhz crystal. The memory floodgates opened and I reminisced about the days of BBSes, Tradewars 2002, ANSI art packs, The Jolly Roger’s cookbook (remember thermite? good times), and countless phreaking texts. I got my initial fix via 1200 baud. After mowing lawns for a summer I was able to hook up the leet 2400 US Robotics.

Back in high school I was quite the ladies man. I had an 85meg hard drive and leech status on all the local bulletin boards. After girls found out I had an SVGA monitor, sound blaster 16, and a 1x CD-ROM, they all wanted me. I used to think it was because I could draw boobs on my TI-85 graphing calculator but it the real reason for the XX chromosome attention was my crazy mad-ill tight soldering skillz.

Just like all teenage boys growing up I had an unhealthy infatuation with the phone company. (that’s normal right?) I read on a BBS text about making free phone calls from pay phones by simulating the sounds that are transmitted when coins are dropped in. (more about redboxes and phreaking here) So with a soldering iron, a 6.5336mhz crystal, and a radio shack 43-141 pocket tone dialer I went to work and built a working redbox.

After spending 30 dollars in parts I couldn’t wait to defraud PacBell of 25 cents. I remember the nervous feeling I had riding my bike over to a local church try out my new babe-magnet redbox.

There was one small problem with my plan, for some reason, I didn’t have any friends outside of my area code to call.

Enjoy the video I posted on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXZMgHKhefk

–higB