[oclug] [OT] Disintermediate the telephone company

[Derek T. Murphy (Home)]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004,  [BB]= Brian Barber wrote:
[and doesn't have word wrap set]

  > [BB] I remember back in the early 90s when Chez 106 was giving away
 106 pairs of tickets to either the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd (I can't
 remember which), but they wouldn't announce the time when the giveaway
 would be until the phones were open.  They only announced what week it
 would be so that you would have to listen the Chez 106 for that week to
 find out when the giveaway was happening.   When they announced it, I
 tried calling in and at first I got the busy signal, then the busy
 circuit signal and finally it got to the point where it took almost 10
 seconds just to get a dial tone.  I heard that they really got their hand
 slapped for that one.
 > [BB]

There was a radio jock in New York City some years ago who used to do
"Dialin' Buddies":  He'd pick a number apparently at random, then get his
listeners to all dial the last digit at the same time (by giving the rest
of the number out first).

Several thousand attempted connections would swamp the exchange's switch
machinery, which would fail open, and Voila! an early implementation of
"Conference Call" (actually known as "Crosstalk").

He got fired, and the station got heavily fined. The switchboards would
sometimes suffer physical damage from the power surges.

The newer digital switches are somewhat different, but can (and do!) get
overwhelmed sometimes, but don't have the same side effect, as far as I
know. (I stopped playing with telephones when the Emergency Signal System
went into effect. I'm NOT admitting anything, mind you, just casually
mentioning some bits of trivia I posess... For the reasons why I won't
admit anything, find out what "Blue Box" used to mean in the mid to
late 80s, and check out your service agreement with Bell...)

 > [BB] Olaf wrote:
 > [BB] "I don't believe that telephone systems are not designed to handle the
 > [BB] situation where every subscriber goes off-hook simultaneously.  In the
 > [BB] past, radio contests with big prizes tended to expose this[1]."

Back in the 80's, the Cyber 170 at Algonquin, after a crash, had a
*terrible* time when everyone tried to log in at the same time. The
operators had to go room to room: "You log in. Now you. Now you..." ANY
digital device has built-in maximums, which when exceeded, cause
"interesting times"...


- -- 
      Tired of Viruses? EMail Worms? Paying for Operating System updates?
Linux is immune to viruses and worms. Linux is free. Do you see a pattern here?
Derek T. Murphy <DerekM at NightTiger.ca> Night Tiger Inc. Kanata, Ontario, Canada
System Administration/Network Security		GPG/PGP keys: www.NightTiger.ca
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQFAzxuJRVr2W6BTungRAokuAKC6UTinv5reXH8isXdsn2h0dc73mgCfQKf3
sxt2jufdrPjo/7W8n9PgHD4=
=9xbh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----