2023-05-15
Maybe I should get asterisk going again, to play with old phone exchanges
There is a museum in Seattle called the Connections Museum and it is on my "If I ever visit that part of the world" list. The reason I found it because one of the volunteers likes to make videos for youtube about the equipment in the museum and the youtube suggestions are on to me. with an interest in phone phreaking in my history this is a very interesting channel. They recently had a video on how blue boxing *actually* worked, including a demonstration of how the switch actually responds to the blue box tones. This made me go "oh now I get it" for details on blue boxing. In the latest youtube video is an explanation that they run asterisk as one way of connecting all their historic phone exchanges. The historic phone exchanges are also connected using direct interconnects. Video announced in In case you haven't seen the latest bit of ridiculous hacking ;) - Connections Museum on Twitter. Video at Is this the world's oldest Linux peripheral? - Connections Museum If I understand the remark about asterisk and Collectors' Net / Phreak Net correctly it should be possible to dial into the old exchanges at the museum from either of those networks. From 2008 to 2013 I played for a while on the Collectors' Net to test my asterisk experiments but when I got less interested and reduced my phone setup at home to a simple voip base again I stopped being a member of Collectors' Net. Maybe I should get back on one of those networks and get something going again! It would be awesome to have an option to dial into the old hardware at the Connections Museum and actually end up in a phone switch from 1923 using a VoIP phone on my side. Or dig up a pulse-dial capable ATA and dial in using the original T65 rotary phone.