Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell

Excellent well-researched history of Phreaking: Love these memories!! Being a phreak active between the late 80's to early 90's, and then off and on until around 2001, I was VERY excited to hear about this book. I had attended HOPE in NYC (my 8th HOPE out of the 9) in July 2012, and had listened to a talk about this upcoming book by the author. I also had a chance to. Don said Balanced and fascinating look at the phone phreak sub-culture. Phil Lapsley presents a wonderful picture of the origins, heyday, and ultimate decline of the phone phreaks of the 1950s - 1970s.The phone phreak phenomenon was a unique convergence of cultural and technological advances. The Bell System began automating their long distance network, reducing its re. Beorn Johnson said A surprisingly compelling read. Nominally, "Exploding the Phone" is a book about phone-system hackers of the 70's. That was my view, and frankly it wasn't all that interesting to me. It happens, though, that I know the author, and I know he had researched the topic for years before even starting the book. As such I felt obligated

It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T's monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell's Achilles' heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of "phone phreaks" who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell's revolutionary "harmonic telegraph", by the middle of the 20th century the phone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people l