What is it? Set 376

" 2167. This is a lock for an old telephone dial, a photo of one locked onto a dial can be seen here, although it should be attached to the first hole, not the last."

Rob, here in OZ, we had the telephone dial and the lock was put in the last hole "0", for that way, anyone could use the phone for local calls, but for interstate calls, the number would be preceded with the "0", thus no interstate calls could be made on the boss's time and telephone, and as we all know, the interstate calls cost an arm and a leg as they were connected manually by a telephonist.

Reply to
George W Frost
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Hmm ... lots of businesses tend to have phone numbers which end in "00" -- and it would preclude dialing those as well -- along with any other number which had a '0' somewhere in it.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I think it was only meant to stop employees using his phone for private calls during working hours. I had one on my phone, but that was to keep the kids from calling long distance by misteak when playing

Reply to
George W Frost

How does putting it in the 0 hole stop someone from dialing 0? A finger could not be put into the hole but it seems that you could still grasp the lock and rotate the dial all the way to the stop.

Reply to
Rob H.

"George W Frost" fired this volley in news:BjH7p.10647$ snipped-for-privacy@viwinnwfe02.internal.bigpond.com:

Think about what you just wrote, George. That couldn't work.

ANYwayy... When I was an early teenager, I knew (just as any electronics-savvy kid of the day did) how to "hook dial". A lock on the dial meant nothing. I could dial any number just by tapping the receiver hook at 10 times per second.

You can still do it today, because the pulse dialing support is still in the systems, by law.

LLoyd

Reply to
Lloyd E. Sponenburgh

I did that once back in the days when the telco guy came out to plug your phone into the wall. I had just moved, and when I went to call out, I got dialtone, but no touchtone. So I "flashed the switchhook" ten times, and the operator came on. She said, "Oh, sounds like polarity." They sent another guy, who swapped the red and green wires. I could have done it myself, but I think at the time they owned everything and it was illegal to mess with it.

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

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I wonder how you would lock out Touch-Tone dialing? I could do it by modifying the phone -- adding a key operated switch in one of the wires connecting the dial to the rest -- but that could still be gotten past using a hand-held touchtone generator which could be held over the microphone. (And they used to be sold for activating things remotely when you were stuck with a rotary dial phone, but the remote control depended on the touch-tone signals instead.

Hmm ... three notch filters in the phone line to cut out the tones associated with each column of buttons should do it. (You know that you get two tones per button -- one associated with the column, and one with the row. On older phones, at least, you can get just the tone for one column by pressing two keys in the column at once, and the same for each row. This was for the old AT&T Touch-Tone dials, with mechanical encoding -- bars which sensed the key at the intersection and closed contacts for both by selecting taps on an inductor. Pressing two in the same column connected two taps on the inductor for the other direction, and thus shorted the signal and silenced it.

With today's phones having less and less mechanical, and more and more electronic, I suspect that the keypads simply make a single contact which is decoded to generate the proper tones.

Sorry -- probably more than most of you wanted to know. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

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Well -- the one shown in the puzzle extends outside the dial, and the stop has a scooped part which the finger goes into to generate sufficient rotation to enable that tenth pulse. With the really old phones, (the 300 series -- very square bases and heavy handsets) you could actually dial by pressing the hookswitch at something close enough to the 10 pulses-per-second which the dial produces. The later 500 series phones looked prettier, but their hookswitch motion was not as crisp, making it more difficult to do.

To develop the timing, it helps to be near the exchange switches, and hear them stepping. I know this because I had built a small dial telephone exchange at my parent's home using surplus Automatic Electric "Strowger" switches -- which Ma Bell called "10x10s".

They were still using them up to about 20 years ago where I worked (an Army base). I could tell by the faint sounds as I dialed. Then it was all replaced by a full electronic system -- not near as much fun. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

DRAT!!

I figured it was a shipping container for the rough metric equivalent of a gross of ping-pong balls.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

Ha, got it in one But you do know that we do things different here in OZ

Reply to
George W Frost

Also if you were on a touch-tone enabled exchange which had step-by-step switches (which were used in various exchanges long, long, long after they were obselete and the 5ESS was king; The Phone Company takes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to extremes), you could hear the pulse generators dialing for you after you finished.

Reply to
Matthew Russotto

When you flush the toilet, the swirl goes clockwise, right? ;-)

Thanks! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

There is a reason that Ma Bell took that attitude. Bell is and was a regulated utility, which means that it is allowed a monopoly, but the price is that its prices are regulated by the Govt, mainly the FCC, for whom I worked in the 1970s.

Basically, Bell was allowed to charge enough to make 8.75% on rate base per year, maintenance costs came out of their hide, and the FCC-set amortization period was 40 years. Now the Bell guys are not stupid, and do respond to incentives. And the above, translated, tells them: "Build it strong, build it for the ages, never mind the cost because you will collect 8.75% per year on it, forever." And so they did.

Joe Gwinn

Reply to
Joseph Gwinn

Of course, the Army base where I used to work had step-by-step switches for the whole base -- and nothing but dial phones installed. (Hmm ... I wonder how the command level people on AutoVON were supplied with the extra touchtone codes like "Flash Override" to kick peons off when they needed a line. :-)

But they pulled that step-by-step exchange perhaps twenty years ago now -- but *long* after I would expect step-by-step to still be in use.

Of course, a step-by-step exchange is pretty immune to the effects of EMP, so they may have kept it for an operational security factor. :-) But -- everything going off post would go through ESS of some form or other -- and they would be vulnerable. (Hmm ... I also wonder how hard Ma Bell worked to harden the electronics to make sure that they could keep working. A phone exchange seems like a major focus of EMP damage.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I wouldn't have a clue, whatever is dispersed out of my rear end doesn't get a look-in when I flush Not interested in shit subjects

Reply to
George W Frost

Ah. So they never clean their toilets?

Thanks, Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

2171. For removing the eyes etc from potatoes or other veg.
Reply to
David

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