Evan Doorbell was the pseudonym used by a well-known but somewhat mysterious phone phreak of the 1970s. His claim to fame is the vast archive of high-quality tape recordings he made of the telephone network of the period, many of which have in recent years been edited and narrated by Doorbell himself, and presented on the World Wide Web at fellow phreak, Mark Bernay’s, web site, Phone Trips.

In this edition of If You’re Just Joining Us, we listen to part one of this amazing recording about phone noises from the 70′s, which is really about curiosity and noticing.

More Phone Phreak tapes, including parts 2 through 6 of Evan Doorbell’s “How I Became” series can be found at: Phone Trips. For MP3 versions of Evan Doorbell’s story they are at ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/ Just scroll down and look for HowBPhreak2HQ etc.

See the Wikipedia entry on Phreaking.

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