When I was a kid my family owned a device whose sole purpose was to rewind vhs tapes.

  • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    A tone dialer. Like this

    https://images.app.goo.gl/fbdmckv44BY7fdWw9

    Not for phone phreaking, just for speed-dialling.

    I would make international calls frequently. I would buy calling cards. The process was: dial the 800 number on the card. Enter the id number on the card to use some of its credit. Dial the number to call. Their service would then connect me at a low rate to another country(probably making a voip call).

    So I’d set up the 3 speed dial buttons with those. For each new card I’d only have to change the card’s unique number.

    • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I was a phone phreak, and I still have my last old-school brown Radio Shack tone dialer which I’d been planning to make into a red box. Ultimately I was too lazy to swap the crystal in it, and it sat in my junk drawer for years while red boxing died. Now it’s a curiosity that sits on my shelf of hacker books. Maybe I’ll still do the crystal swap someday for the sheer hell of it.