Mike Masnick ✅Kinda hoping that Netflix's new "we'll ban you if you watch the Netflix account you paid for outside of your home too much" story turns into a "New Coke"-style business school case study in how to do something totally stupid that pisses off your most loyal customers, and leads Netflix to reverse course quickly.
Lauren Weinstein@mmasnick Kinda reminds me of how in early public Internet days some big ISPs tried to charge separately for every device hooked to the Net, and even tried to ban NAT.
Kevin@lauren @mmasnick The phone company did this too. First you had to rent phones from them, then pay for each device connected. One of the ways they found "illegal" phones was the voltage drop from the number of phones that rang for an incoming call. So phone makers added a switch to turn off the ringer.
First phone mute button was for pirate phones.
@kevin @mmasnick By the time there were phones being sold publicly the major telcos had long since stopped counting subscriber phones. The traditional method for blocking the count of extra phones while still permitting them to ring was to put a neon bulb in series with the ringer. Or uh, so I've been told.
JR Buckley 🏳️🌈⚛️@JRBuckley @kevin @mmasnick I've never heard of that. Unless there's a bypass, it also means you couldn't add someone onto an extension during a call!
@lauren @kevin @mmasnick
Exactly, only one extension could be used at a time.
Admittedly, I was 10 when I first encountered this and it was in locations controlled by the US Military (offices and off-base housing) in West Berlin, so I don't know if this was a standard thing or if I misunderstood its purpose, etc. I never saw it anywhere else after that or during the 12 years I spent in Southern Germany in the 1980s-90s.
@kevin @JRBuckley @mmasnick That was AUTOVON. Fourth column red buttons: FO - F - I - P (flash override, flash, immediate, priority).
These phones looked like the standard gray German phones of the day except for the mechanical indicator. Now that I'm wracking my brain over something I haven't thought of in close to 50 years, I think some of our German friends had phones like these, too.
It may have been a Cold War/Berlin thing.
Petrichor ᚄᚔᚅᚐᚁᚆᚃᚒᚔᚂ@sinabhfuil @kevin @mmasnick I've never heard of an operator initiating the howl. For sure many systems would run a howl for a relatively brief period if a phone was left off hook. Maybe some even kept it going until the handset was hung up again. Though smaller systems certainly could vary in practice.
@lauren @sinabhfuil @mmasnick Is the howl the strobing tone you'd get when you left a handset off hook? I remember us getting the North American tone on the Wikipedia page, but never heard it referred to as a howl. Jeez, I haven't heard that in forever.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-hook_tone
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-hook_tone
@kevin @sinabhfuil @mmasnick There are different ones. Some sound like sirens up and down. Others are loud BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP tones at a high rate.
@kevin @lauren @mmasnick
My grandfather built his house and it wasn't until the switch to touch tone dialing that the Phone Co realized that he'd installed a phone outlet in every room and had a dozen phones (not all plugged in at the same time). I don't remember exactly what happened, but there was drama.
My grandfather built his house and it wasn't until the switch to touch tone dialing that the Phone Co realized that he'd installed a phone outlet in every room and had a dozen phones (not all plugged in at the same time). I don't remember exactly what happened, but there was drama.
AlexisDyslexic@alexisdyslexic @mmasnick They want to sell you a higher speed connection.