Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. (Psychology Today, 3/22)

[erronis]

22. Neither. I click on the receiver cradle multiple times.

If anyone remembers this.

Say I wanted to dial 4-1-1:
- 4 quick clicks in succession, pause
- 1 click, pause
- 1 click, pause.

And then there were the phone tone generators (blue boxes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box

Subculture

The widespread ability to blue box, once limited to just a few isolated individuals exploring the telephone network, developed into a subculture.[10][11] Famous phone phreaks such as "Captain Crunch", Mark Bernay, and Al Bernay used blue boxes to explore the various "hidden codes" that could not be dialled by a standard telephone.[citation needed]

Some of the more famous pranksters were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, founders of Apple Computer.[13] On one occasion, Wozniak dialed Vatican City and identified himself as Henry Kissinger (imitating Kissinger's German accent) and asked to speak to the Pope (who was sleeping at the time).[14][13] Wozniak said in 1986:[15]

I called only to explore the phone company as a system, to learn the codes and tricks. I'd talk to the London operator, and convince her I was a New York operator. When I called my parents and my friends, I paid. After six months I quit--I'd done everything that I could.

I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying to make money. But then I thought we were all pure.

Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."[16]