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Listen to ALL of the above Group Bell tapes first to get a feel for Evan Doorbell's sense of humor, then listen to:
Evan Doorbell and friends made tapes of other people's joke lines in Southern California:
- ZZZZZZ Part 1 (1971-1974)
- ZZZZZZ Part 2 (1971-1974)
- ZZZZZZ Part 3 (1974-1976)
- The Main Line (Summer, 1974)
- Al Bernay Comment Tape Excerpts (July, 1976)
Phone Tripper Frank Wilsey visited the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum in Seattle, WA and the New England Museum of Telephony in North Ellsworth, Maine. Both museums have complete, fully-restored, fully-functional, electromechanical switching machines just like the ones you hear in the phonetrip tapes above. You really must visit them to see and use the equipment instead of just listening to old tapes. Frank made tapes on the history of telephone switching using sounds he recorded inside the museums as examples.
- Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum (August, 2000)
-     Pictures of this museum taken by Ed Greenberg
-     Pictures of the Roseville Telephone Museum taken by Ed Greenberg
- New England Museum of Telephony (August, 2000)
Phone tripper Joseph G. Molter (aka JeepMan), email [email protected], took a trip to La Crosse, IN and made a recording from a payphone and from inside the switchroom.
- Step by step in La Crosse, IN (September, 1998)
- Inside the step by step switchroom in La Crosse, IN (September, 1998)
Phone tripper Trace McCall sent us a recording he made inside a step by step central office, and he promised to send us more. The pulse repeating followed by the loud chattering was a CAMA trunk MF sending to the Frederick Tandem office. At the beginning of the segment, in the background you can make out a "snoring" sound. That's a linefinder group running a switchman-started test.
Phone tripper Mike Tate visited a United Telephone payphone in Winter
Park, FL, on the night when their
NX1 switch was being replaced with a Northern Telecom DMS100 switch. He
made two recordings documenting this event. The first is playing
around dialing various numbers with the NX1. The second starts with a
reorder (fast busy)
signal coming from the NX1. He
let the busy signal go until the switch was taken out of
service and the tape rolls until the new switch gives the dial tone.
Mike says that the DMS 100 is still in service.
- Winter Park FL, United Telephone, NX1 (September, 1987)  ***NEW***
- Winter Park FL, United Telephone, cutover from NX1 to DMS100 (September, 1987)  ***NEW***
The following are other people's telephone recordings that I dialed and recorded at various times.
- Let Freedom Ring about the Communist threat from the Beatles (March, 1969)
- Let Freedom Ring about the proper role for women (December, 1969)
- Pacific Telephone Newsline, August 29, 1968 (allow customer-owned equipment)
- Pacific Northwest Bell Newsline, March 20, 1969 (touch tone banking - in 1969!)
- Pacific Northwest Bell Newsline, March 11, 1970
(1932 recording of Mr. Watson)
      (Here is a longer and clearer recording of Mr. Watson) - Comic Book News, San Francisco, final recording (November, 1972)
- Kids talking over soft recording during phone strike
OK, so what are these recordings all about? Why are they here?
Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay and 35 years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it's true: just like the people in the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns primarily for the purpose of playing with their payphones. I often brought along my trusty Craig 212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was before cassettes were popular) to record the phone noises and narrate information about them for my friends. I don't go on phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that this is because I grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone tripping is that all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays and they are really boring.
This picture shows my recording equipment around 1968, which I used to edit these tapes and prepare them for playing on a public phone number. My current desk is just as messy, but with PC's instead of reel-to-reel tape recorders.
I first started playing with phones -- not talking on them, but playing with the switching systems and the network -- when I was a teenager growing up in Los Angeles. My family moved from Pacific Telephone (now Pacific Bell) territory to General Telephone. I noticed big differences in the noises the phone made as the dial tone came on, in between digits as numbers were dialed, after dialing and the call was switching through, etc. I did a lot of reading about telephone switching systems and visited many phone company switchrooms to learn what was going on.
I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle in 1968. Seattle itself had completely different telephone switching systems than either Pacific Telephone or General Telephone in Los Angeles. When I started driving around the Seattle area I noticed that many of the little towns had their own independent phone companies and every one had different equipment. My phone phreak friends in Los Angeles (and later in Seattle) wanted to hear this variety of phone noises I was telling them about, so I tape recorded by holding the microphone of the recorder against the earphones of the payphones. (I was aware of telephone pickup coils, but they picked up too much hum from the fluorescent lights in payphones.)
Unfortunately I wasn't into photography at the time these tapes were made and I have no pictures of myself on a phone trip. I got the photo at the top from a friend who also went on phone trips, but none of the people in that picture took part in these recordings. The gentleman at the payphone is famous and you probably heard of him.
Please send your comments and questions to [email protected]
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