8 Bit Underground

So I was trolling around on a message board (binrev) the other day and I stumbled across this picture and thought it was pretty neat.

Obviously this was placed in print around the same time that the phone company began using digital switches and gained the ability to (easily) establish caller ID of those troubled souls who did things such as make profane and prank type calls.

The thing that I really enjoy about the ad is how the phone company really tries to give the reader a sense of “we can get you”. I think it was somewhat a sign of the times; the digital age was beginning and the phone company knew that there were all kinds of ways that it was going to benefit them and they wanted the public to know about them.

This type of attitude though probably helped a lot of people continue to think that the phone company was nothing more than a money sucking, “big brother” type entity and made them fear and loathe it even more than they already did.

Something else that I find somewhat funny is that while my friends and I certainly made plenty of joke calls back in the day, I never once remember getting or hearing about anyone else getting any type of obscene phone call. I’m sure it still happens even today, but this was the kind of stuff that happened in movies, not in real life – and I grew up around a very large city.

Taking this ad even further into the context of this site, I have to ask myself – were there more people in 1970 making obscene phone calls, or more people defrauding the phone company by exposing and using loopholes that they found such as blue box control tones?

I have to answer that question and imagine that there had to have been more people abusing the phone system in ways other than prank/obscene calls that their advertising dollars would have been better spent trying to ward off those who were stealing from them rather than the 1 in 1000 people who got off by making calls to old women at midnight.

The ad then goes on and dangles some futuristic term “voice print” in front of us. As if they were taking a sample of the human voice and somehow matching that to our identity – something that not even the current day phone company could do for every customer.

Finally the reader is told that if they aren’t scared enough that they should be “because we haven’t told you everything”.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sure glad that we get to deal with the happy, sunny phone company of today rather than the “voice print” agency of 1970.

Check the forums tonight – I will be adding the first files to the download areas.. I very likely will NOT have time to add the app list to the blog tonight – but without a doubt *will* add some downloads to the forums.

NOTE – The archive page is now live – albeit only with two entries. Please let me know if you have any issues. I will be updating the archive, blog, and forums quite a bit in the coming weeks/months. There is a GOB of material to sort through, screenshot, and document and I look forward to every bit of it!

I apologize for the delay and thank you very much for the hits here.

Well its been about 2 months now that the blog has been alive. From watching the hit tracker it appears there is at least a small amount of interest in what I am doing here – though I assumed there would have been at least some spam comments posted by now.. Don’t worry though, I am not discouraged at all by the response. As a matter of fact, the past two months of delving back into 8 bit computing and the underground of yesterday has really been somewhat healing for me in some odd way.

With that said – the next several months will be a challenge. I have a few things going on in real life, as well as the task of categorizing, documenting, and presenting as much 8bit underground propaganda to you as I possibly can – and the amount of information that I have to place online is beginning to grow beyond even my own expectations – though sadly not much of it is Atari related.

Either I am just not looking in the right places – or it seems like the Atari underground related stuff – especially hacker/phreaker stuff (programs) just didn’t make it to the new millennium with all of the c64/128 and apple stuff that did.

I will keep my fingers crossed though and continue to badger as many collectors as I can with the hopes that among their 1450XLD’s, and 3.5″ XF551’s that there lies some box, wardialer, and long distance code scanners from yesterday that will only run on my beloved Atari 8bit series of computers.

I will most likely update the blog again with an “on topic” post this coming weekend – but I just wanted to drop a note of thanks this evening.