Pres. Biden's warning at the White House Juneteenth concert: "There are old ghosts in new garments"

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10. Pipeline, Jam Line, or Beep Line

Thanks to a quirk of the old analog system, savvy phone customers had access to chat lines long before that term was coined. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Bell System started implementing its new Electronic Switching System, and during that lengthy and elaborate process, the modern switches were installed parallel to the old mechanical devices already in place. As a result, a loop was created so that when a circuit was overloaded, people could talk to one another between the beeps of a busy signal or during the spaces between a repeating “Your call could not be completed as dialed” recording. It didn’t take long for teens to exploit this easy and cost-free way (because you didn’t get charged for an incomplete call) to talk to a whole horde of people. The key was that a lot of people had to dial the same number in order to properly overload the circuit. The phenomenon was called different things in different locales, including “the Jam Line,” “the Beep Line,” and “the Pipeline.”

(sorry, corrupted link)