Mark Blevis

During a conversation today, I recounted a time when my friends and I exploited a loophole in the telephone system to stay in touch while in different cities.  The result was short, bursty and slightly asynchronous communications, not unlike Twitter.

The trick was to call each other, collect.  The phone company had an automated attendant which prompted the “Collect Caller” to say their name after the tone.  The system allowed maybe 3-5 seconds of recording time, during which we could blurt out a brief communication.  The system would then tell the caller to wait while it sought to get the charges accepted.  When the call was answered, the automated attendant would kick in and say “You have a collect call from…” and it would play the recorded message.

This back-and-forth exchange sometimes went of for an hour or more.  As annoying as it may have been, it was the only free mode of quasi-real-time long distance communication at the time — several years before the Internet.