Who remembers "Tapping"?
Posted by FlashyProject1318@reddit | GenX | View on Reddit | 124 comments
Then being asked questions when the phone bill came in?
Posted by FlashyProject1318@reddit | GenX | View on Reddit | 124 comments
Then being asked questions when the phone bill came in?
idrathern0tsay@reddit
buddy of mine and I figured out you could record the sounds of coins going into the pay phone, play them back and make phone calls that way. He swiped his dad's micro reorder and we made some calls. 80's were great! Almost talked my dad into making a blue box, but he figured out what it would do.
pm344@reddit
This made calling Jenny really difficult!
plutus911@reddit
I got it (I got it) I got it
Molbiodude@reddit
Got your number off the wall
mrsroperscaftan@reddit
For a good time For a good time call
preposterousputty@reddit
8
MarvinHeemeyersTank@reddit
6
SimpleVegetable5715@reddit
1-800-94-JENNY
Oh wait, did you mean Jenny Craig or 867-5309 Jenny?
FollowTheFellow@reddit
My Dad taught me to tap-dial on the office phones at the university where he worked. Never used it myself, though later I bought a handheld touch-tone generator (probably through 2600 magazine).
funkympc@reddit
Blue boxes were a pretty common electronics project in the late 70s and early 80s. Unfortunately by the early 90s most telcos had changed their switching from analog to digital and blue boxes no longer worked.
REDDITSHITLORD@reddit
I ran a secret phone line into my room. I also did the same with cable. It just so happened that the original access to the attic was in my closet, and my parents did a poor job of sealing it off. all the house wiring ran through that space,
Affectionate-Map8311@reddit
You could even use it in public phone boxes so you could use the phone without paying
Minimum-Car5712@reddit
Paperclip was easier
deephurting66@reddit
Old phone phreak here and can confirm, punch the speaker, metal to metal and you were golden
brushfuse@reddit
Just get the operator, it’s easy. There’s a movie called Manhunter. Masterclass in defeating pre-touchstone POTS.
nadiaco@reddit
Yup
blackhorse15A@reddit
Something feels very wrong with that phone. Like, the numbers and the hook/stop are in the wrong place.
PuffDragon66@reddit
It’s just the angle that the picture is taken from.
blackhorse15A@reddit
No. I'm in the US. I noticed the emergency number in the photo above is 999. Went looking at some photos closer and it's different.
The old Bell/Western Electric rotary phones here in the States, the little metal stop is/was higher up at about the 4 o'clock position with 8 and 9 straddling the bottom (6 o'clock). The one above the zero is practically straight down at 6 o'clock and I'm used to zero and nine being decidedly to the right of center. 5 and 6 straddling the 9 o'clock and 2 and 3 at the top. Looks like the US dials had more space between each number hole. And the span from 1 to 0 took up more of the circle. The one above seems to be less than 270 degrees for all the numbers. I'm used to it being more like 300 degrees if the circle.
FlashyProject1318@reddit (OP)
Many years ago, in the UK, telephonea were hard wired to a box and you wasn't allowed your own telephone. These were the basic UK issued phones - you could pay extra for different colours.
Likewise, locks were common place in homes with children!
blackhorse15A@reddit
Same deal in the US. Although I don't remember locks being a common thing.
seattlemh@reddit
Why? It looks normal.
blackhorse15A@reddit
See my other comment. But US rotaries had the numbers spaced further apart, the stopper was higher up, and numbers oriented a bit different- like 9 would be to the right of center instead of the left.
RikB666@reddit
This is a UK phone.
ParticularLower7558@reddit
Some phones the hook stop would also rotate around with the dial. Especially with a small hand held phone like a princess phone.
antmakka@reddit
I remember going to a house party where I didn’t know many people. The parents had put this lock on the phone but their kids knew about tapping. They thought it was impossible to tap a phone number with a zero in it because they couldn’t tap zero times. I knew about tapping 10 times for a zero but I was too shy to say anything.
I still think about it 40 years later.
Error418ZA@reddit
Indeed, tapping worked perfectly, mother thinking she can outsmart a teenager by putting the lock on the 0...
Historical_Project86@reddit
Someone told me about this, I never believed it was real until now! What's funny is that my dad could have confirmed the theory if I'd asked him - he worked for BT in the UK.
Dry_Ad687@reddit
Holy Shit a rotary phone lock. I forgot those even existed.
NotEasilyConfused@reddit
I have never even known they existed.
UnicornFarts1111@reddit
I have never seen one. I did see a phone with the dial removed though.
AngelSparkles@reddit
Worked at a grocery store where the wall phone had its dial removed to prevent calling out. Used tapping to call for my dad to pick me up at the end of my shift.
lindabhat@reddit
I did this with the pay phone at school when I had no money and needed to be picked up by my parents after school activities. Usually worked.
Wactout@reddit
That was something I haven’t thought about it in over 40 years.
Wildskypsj@reddit
I was an absolute PRO. 🤣
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
I wanna know if any knew how to phone phreak?
johko814@reddit
Phantom phreak, the king of nynex.
Aware_Impression_736@reddit
You mean by using an Oscar Mayer wiener whistle?
LadyAiluros@reddit
Captain Crunch!!
Aware_Impression_736@reddit
He inspired dozens of us.
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
I know there was a guy who could actually whistle and do it, but I think most people used some sort of device. Did you use a whistle?
Icy-Reception-7605@reddit
Blue boxer here.
abysmalkarma@reddit
Nice - Black & Beige here. My claim to fame was getting all of my part numbers from Radio-Shack added to the Jolly Roger!
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
Really? I'd never even heard about it until I was in my 30s. How did you get into it?
Icy-Reception-7605@reddit
Late 80s, Commodore 64. Use to call skate shops in California to ask them to mail stickers to us in Canada. Good times.
Punk-hippie-5446@reddit
LOVED my C64. Taught myself BASIC on that thing.
FluidSubject@reddit
Phrack magazine from the BBS days
RandyRVA@reddit
Of course! How else would we be able to make long distance calls, for hours to download warez.
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
How did you get into it? I never know anything about it
totallyjaded@reddit
Tons of BBS'es had instructions for making different boxes.
They were also a good place to meet people who were... telecom enthusiasts.
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
I guess it was a whole counterculture that I knew nothing about. But I wish I did.
Buckaroo-Banana@reddit
I’ll never tell-2600hz tone.
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
How did you learn about it?
radioactivecat@reddit
Maybe.
toadgoat@reddit
Or how about “popcorn” for the time. “At the tone the time is…”
preposterousputty@reddit
Call WWV (303) 499-7111
Still going for broadcasters.
Phobos1982@reddit
Never had a lock on our phone.
ParticularLower7558@reddit
Only time I seen it was at work. Management would put locks on when they left so night shift couldn't call out long distance.
Ermmahhhgerrrd@reddit
We didn't, either. I'm not sure my silent gen parents knew this existed bc they definitely would've locked it. It was literally on the wall between the living room and kitchen, though so not much privacy, if any.
AggravatingBobcat574@reddit
In high school someone discovered we could dial some number that would give a busy signal, but you could talk in between the beeps. And multiple kids could all talk at once.
jeffster1970@reddit
Do you remember that there was another code you could use (maybe 958?) before your number and hang-up, then you'd get the phone ringing. No one on the other side, obviously.
It was a fun prank to play at your friend's house. Dial 958-###-#### and hang up. Phone rings and parents are like "what the hell?".
Numerous_Bad1961@reddit
Yeah
junkmail0178@reddit
Wait. What? Explain this to me like I’m 5, I don’t get it
my_clever-name@reddit
Some numbers were always busy when you called them. The word got out in junior high and high school. The number was shared. People would call that number and talk to other people between the busy beeps.
It was random people. Not much of substance was said. It kept us busy.
jpb7875@reddit
After learning about touch tones and the history of this old thing, I thought I was super cool by dialing with tapping.
kerosenehat63@reddit
We did this at the restaurant I worked at in the 80s. We had a phone with the dial removed because it was only to be used for incoming calls for take out orders. We realized we could tap the clicker to dial anywhere … even long distance!!
curious-thatguy@reddit
lol, I Still got this in my garage.😎
Electronic_Algae_524@reddit
My high school had two ASR33 Teletypes and a GE Terminette that used acoustic couplers. The telephones were dial. The school thought they could keep us from getting to the District's time share system by locking the dials. Never underestimate a high school computer nerd...😉
Thick_You2502@reddit
I do, it was thousand years ago....
FormerLaugh3780@reddit
OMG, my parent had the phone locked like that to stop my older siblings from running up the bill.
GayForPay@reddit
Viewed through the 2026 lens of people having anxiety when their phone's battery drops below 20%, this is wild.
Rare_Cauliflower_330@reddit
I remember when I was staying with a friend in Bradford, England. I used the wall phone on the Bradford University campus to call my mom in the States. It was locked in a way that only certain "helpful" numbers could be dialed. But, we had a cheat. One could tap the hook switch the number of times corresponding to the digit you wanted to dial. It took a bit to dial Mom's number but it was worth it. It was hell if you messed up and had to start over, though. It let me talk to Mom a lot back then. Too bad they took out that phone soon after I left. I wonder why!
TollyVonTheDruth@reddit
I vividly remember the rotary dial phone, but I do not ever recall it involving a lock and key.
Ok-Rock2345@reddit
I remember the lock. The phone in my schools office had one.
GenXWaster@reddit
My parents did this. I would set up my Amiga and portable TV next to the phone and use a modem dialer program to play the touch tones through the TV speaker.
Worked a treat until the itemised bill came through.
Badrear@reddit
Was this where you just tapped the hang up buttons? I remember tapping them randomly and that it seemed to be calling someone, but I didn’t know you could control it.
SuperLeroy@reddit
Pulse dialing.
You could tap the hookswitch quickly to create a pulse similar to what spinning the numbers would do. Essentially it would hang up the phone very briefly. As long as you didn't hang up the phone too long, it would interpret the hookswitch flash as pulse dialing. Otherwise, if you held down too long, when you let up you would get dial tone and have to start over.
But if you want to call 555-1212, you would do something like:
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap (for the first 5)
Wait at least a quarter second or so
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap (for next 5)
Wait at least a quarter second or so
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap (for the third 5)
Wait at least a quarter second or so
Tap (for the 1)
Wait at least a quarter second or so
Tap-tap (for the 2)
Wait at least a quarter second or so
Tap (for the next 1)
Wait at least a quarter second or so
Tap-tap
Then you should hear ringback or busy or whatever error message you would get for dialing 555-1212
Later on you could use the hookswitch flash to switch to the "other line" e.g. "call waiting"
You would hear a beep if someone called you while you already talking to someone else. You could hang up briefly and when you let up on the hookswitch it would switch to the other party and put your first caller on hold.
avj@reddit
simply press NO times for zero
Sa7aSa7a@reddit
So, it basically worked on switches. When you turned the dial, it was doing the same thing as pressing the buttons to hang up the phone over and over again. So you were just doing the job of the dial.
ronald_culley@reddit
I remember hating people whose phone number ended in 9’s and 0’s.
my_clever-name@reddit
That's why the first area codes' middle digit was a 0 or 1. Big cities like New York (212), Chicago (312), DC (202) had lower digit numbers in the first and last place. Places with fewer people like Utah (801) got higher numbers.
This was back in the day when calls within an area code didn't need the area code to be dialed.
Ok-Macaroon-7819@reddit
My best friend in middle school was 987-9000, and because the same line was used for her father's business, I would frequently get a busy signal...
jeffster1970@reddit
When area codes (Canada and the US) were first introduced, the more important cities got the lower digits, like NYC got 212 -- which would have been the minimum movement for 'dialing'. Larger provinces and states all got #1# as their area code, while small provinces and states got the dread #0#.
Not longer matters today. And we now use 2-9 as a middle digit.
Wake95@reddit
My phone number for a few years was 929-0000.
ronald_culley@reddit
xxx-9900, xxx-0009
NotSure2505@reddit
Anyone remember how much trouble you could get in simply by using the phone in the 70s and 80s?
Long distance charges.
Calling "Information."
976- numbers.
Accepting collect calls?
fallcreekprepper@reddit
I had a "Summertime girlfriend" Who lived in Texas and came to Alabama in the Summer to visit her grandparents. For a few Summers, we got together when she came to visit, the first year after she went home, we called each other and would talk for hours at a time. I got in such trouble when the phone bill came. I can't remember how much it was, but it was a lot, it cost me most of my pay from my part time job for like a month.
Perfect-Squash3773@reddit
My family boarded students from around the world, but mostly Japan. The phone company had a deal that you could get points for long distance calls and apply the points to your bills. So my parents gave the long distance charges to the students, as their calls would accumulate to the thousands and my parents paid the rest of the bill with the points.
angerintensifies@reddit
My dad worked for At&T and would occasionally get weird features added to our phone. One time he got an 800 number so we could call for rides. Inevitably, my sister gave it to her friends and they all called us on my dad’s dime. That went away real quick.
Imcrappinyounegative@reddit
I’d get in trouble if I called people in the city two over from us bc it was considered a toll call so they charged more by the minute.
ave427@reddit
My best friend in high school was a long distance phone call. Same county, only about 12 miles from me.
Perfect-Squash3773@reddit
I remember getting a phone call and it was one of my brother friend's. Although he did not call us, his phone rang at the same time as ours.
CommonCut2063@reddit
I remember calling a random number and asking "is your refrigerator running?" "Yes." "Go, chase it!" and similar pranks.
Shackdaddy161@reddit
Hi, is Mike there? No, I'm his friend Dick and me and Harry wondered if Mike's dick's hairy. 8 or old lmao. Hangup. Or seldom, seldom, she would carry on the conversation in detail.. I loved those free spirits but it scared the shit out of my friends.. early FAFO could be a riot sometimes.
Gelisol@reddit
That was you?!? My seven-year-old self was so confused. I asked my family how I should answer. They all started laughing. I didn’t understand until I was old enough to do my own crank calls.
sherrib99@reddit
Hello bowling alley, do you have 10lb balls? Yes? How do you walk!
Privatier2025@reddit
I remember and used it sometimes on a locked phone in one of or church's rooms. I'm in Germany and or emergency call number is 112. I remember a story that made it into the newspaper where a dog tapped that number by accident.
PrettyWorn_@reddit
I can’t believe how long it took to dial a number 😵💫 can you remember the sound it made? lol
jeffster1970@reddit
I still have a functioning dial phone. Goes through a Grandstream ATA which allows for that type of dialing. Also allows for 7-digit calling within same area code.
totallyjaded@reddit
On phones that were physically restricted from dialing all 10 digits, you could often tap ten times, tell the operator that your phone was acting up, and have them dial for you.
Say, for instance, tapping the receiver on an emergency phone inside a low-traffic elevator, instead of pushing the help button.
xt0rt@reddit
Op-diverting
DarePitiful5750@reddit
You could also just fully tap out a 7 digit phone number
agent_smith_3012@reddit
I processed a weekends worth of credit card authorizations on rotary. I developed circular callouses
Bloody_Mabel@reddit
Who has no idea what "tapping" is?
SunMyungMoonMoon@reddit
Tapping the phone to simulate the clicks from the rotary dial, aka an alternate way to dial a number and bypass the type of lock in the photo.
Bloody_Mabel@reddit
Why would there be a lock on the phone?
SunMyungMoonMoon@reddit
Theoretically, it's to prevent people from dialing, which tapping gets around. The most likely intention was to prevent people from making unauthorized long-distance calls.
AJourneyer@reddit
Or preventing you from calling the boy your parents didn't like.
Mammoth_Ad_483@reddit
UnicornFarts1111@reddit
When I was like 6 my friend had a phone in their basement like this model, except the dial was gone completely. We knew we could tap to call, but were never really successful in doing so, since we were so young, lol.
Historical_Bath_9854@reddit
I just had the operator call🤷
YellowBreakfast@reddit
I knew it was possible but we never had a lock like this.
iloveairportsushi@reddit
Ours was never locked either…
EnoughEstate7483@reddit
Nut tapping?
Sure, my friends and I always did that. Good times.
Oshabeestie@reddit
Yes - the 0 and 9s were difficult if they were at the end of the number.
ChadTitanofalous@reddit
Payphones on campus when I was in college were pay to unlock the dial, but all had a dial tone. We tapped very well.
Evening-Crazy-3528@reddit
I lived in a seasonal tourist area in HS. Many of my friends’ parents owned motels. One had a lock on the phone at the front desk just like that.
One afternoon I told my friend that we could make calls from the phone, despite the lock. He didn’t believe me, so I showed him how.
And at that time we only had to dial the last 5 digits of local numbers to make a call, so it was easy to do.
yarn_slinger@reddit
So I rented an apartment in Vienna in the late 80s. It belonged to a sports promoter to house visiting athletes but they had a vacancy when I needed it.
What i didn’t realize (and had never seen) was that they could lock the keypad. I could receive but couldn’t make calls. After a couple of weeks of running down the street to a phone booth, doing the collect call schtick and running back to wait for the call, I got pretty fed up with it.
I noticed that phones were hardwired into the Jack, not like at home with plugs. I bought a cheap phone, unscrewed the original one and made all the calls I wanted for the rest of the summer.
EmpireCityRay@reddit
It was wild when my mom clamped that shit on the phone. She wielded that key like a chastity belt key. 😂
Hes_anarc2005@reddit
Totally remember doing this lol
My parents couldn’t fathom how on earth the phone bill was so high after putting a lock on it.
smsmkiwi@reddit
You could "tap" payphones in NZ. For the number you wanted to dial, you'd dial the sequence of numbers that were the difference between the phone number sequence and 10, i.e. instead of 61743...etc you'd dial 49367... It used to work before the digital system came in.
BeebsMuhQueen@reddit
I mainly remember if you got something (a number) wrong, you had to start over and wait for it to roll back all the time. 🤣 Grandma had numbers taped to the side
DrKeepitreal@reddit
First time seeing this.
edgarecayce@reddit
I’ve never seen a lock like this but I had a broken phone and figured out tapping by myself.