We Just Called Them Dialers

by Eric Meisberger

The Blue Box is intrinsically linked to the culture of hacking.  What I want to talk about isn't the Blue Box, but the so-called Red Box.  I say so-called because I never knew it by that name.

In the early 1990s, there was an interesting intersection between hacker/phreaker culture and underground music culture.  Hardcore music, less punk in aesthetic (swap out a leather jacket for a hoodie, and Docs for Vans), but still DIY and punk in ethos, converged with the world of phreaking and hacking as some anarcho-minded folks began looking to, in this case, make free phone calls.  In a pre-widespread Internet age, setting up a tour for your band with a notebook, a map, and a telephone was how things were done.  Enter the Red Box... or, as I (and many others) knew it, the dialer.

As many readers undoubtedly know, a Red Box dialer was a hacked piece of electronic equipment that, when placed over the microphone of the handset on a payphone, created a sound that emulated a nickel, dime, or quarter being dropped into the payphone.  Interestingly, in doing a little research on this, I even found out about analog Red Boxes.  These were for the technically challenged.  This device was a rigged-up cassette tape case with a rubber band wrapped around it.  When opened slightly, and the band was snapped, it would make a sound slightly like that of a Red Box, or a quarter going into the phone.  I have no idea how well these worked!

Crowdsourcing some informal oral online history (90s hardcore emo records and tapes, Facebook group) seems to point to dialers coming into punk hxc culture around 1993, and were ubiquitous four years later.  By 1998, Red Box dialers were basically useless.  The lack of payphones and the dreaded experience of an operator coming on and saying they knew what you were doing were on the rise.  Asking some folks who were using dialers back then yielded a few funny anecdotes of operators busting people.

"I know what you're doing punk!  Stay right there - the cops are on the way!"

"I liked it when the operator would come on if you pushed the dialer buttons too fast.  They knew what was going on but I would pretend to fumble around with quarters anyway."

"In Texas, while on tour, I was using one and the operator came on.

'Honey, in Texas, we use real money to pay for payphone calls.  We don't cheat with those little boxes.  That'll get the police called on you.  Shall I call them?' she said.

I replied, 'No ma 'am.  I have the coins right here.'

I left.  We went on down the road and used another payphone.  No problems."

A few people I came across even mentioned the "2600 crew" in their remembering.

Indeed, 2600 did publish pieces about the nuts and bolts of making a dialer into a Red Box (in the Autumn 1990 issue specifically, in a piece by Noah Clayton), and a few years later BillSF wrote a piece about all the "color boxes" that could be made ("True Colors" in Autumn 1993).  BillSF mentions explicitly in that piece that use of a Red Box was, " ...now very popular in the States.  Is anything but safe!  Do not use!"  I found that particularly interesting, as that is pretty much when the jump from Red Box/dialer use had made the switch from phreaks to hardcore kids.  At least BillSF was on the fore of knowing this was something to back away from, while the punks and hardcore kids were barging in full on!  That said, dialer use among phreaks and phreak-adjacent folks continued for at least four years or so before it was a dead hack.

Some folks talked about IRC and alt.punk.[fillintheblank] (and even a few mentions of "the Straight Edge List" for those of you for whom that might mean something, as it did for me!  I hadn't thought of that in a while!).  These message boards would allow people to communicate and exchange ideas in a way that literally a few months or years before was done through letters or zines.  Through this expanded communication there was a crossover of hacker/phreak culture and punk hxc culture.  Along with this came for some a critique of, and direct action toward, capitalism.  So-called commodity hacking and scamming had a large renaissance at this time as well.  Zines and info at punk and hardcore shows increasingly dealt with scams and other commodity hacks (from soaping or gluing stamps to salt-watering drinks machines and beyond) that people could use.

My interest in technology in general, and where tech meets hacking in particular, is really in the arena of where the social aspects of technology are realized.  The fact that a subculture that means a great deal to me has a very real and very interesting crossover into the world of hacker and phone phreak culture is quite fascinating.  Digging back into all of this made me want to look more at those connections.  Looking at how a subculture that was based on making music and publishing zines and doing more with less in many ways collided with a culture that prided itself on the same things in the world of tech was quite special.  This has allowed me to reflect on how the individualism; the anarchistic streak; the active, hands-on critique of capitalism; and the dyed in the wool ethic of Do-It-Yourself operated in multiple worlds.  Because of timing and the spread of communication and online communities, the lines between those worlds could blur.

It was the early Internet Age: the connection of hacker/phreak culture and punk hxc culture through message boards, communication lanes not previously available, the do-it-yourself spirit of punk and hxc including a "make do with less" streak.  Some of these actions are certainly based in activism, but some are merely from not having the resources to do what you want to do - so you hack a system to be able to do it.  And, of course, some of this was for fun, or to simply hack a system because it was there.

I dare say that people who came up in the DIY hardcore and punk scenes might interact with tech in a different way than many others.  Knowing how things can be modified, changed, and scammed gave many of us a new perspective (and an approach of critical thinking) on how to look at multiple aspects of life.  From jobs to politics to hobbies, we saw things that others might not have been able to recognize.  Some of us had been hacking multiple parts of our lives and cultures for long enough to know that when tech becomes ubiquitous it can, and will, be hacked too.  Like all hackers and phreaks, figuring out what to do next is up to each of us.