And speaking of telephone mischief, here’s a Dianatek model 041 pen register, designed for use not by law enforcement, but by telephone companies. The telco security department would hook this up to your line (at the central office) if you were suspected of making harassing calls or otherwise misbehaving with your service. It also detects signals used by blue boxes, despite being made well after they were obsolete. Resembles a movie prop bomb that starts a short countdown when you open it.
@mattblaze I'm a little surprised that it has the ABCD keys. I guess autovon use perhaps?
@tippenring No, it doesn't seem to generate dtmf at all. The keypad is just to enter phone numbers, set the time and date, control the printer, etc.
@tippenring It does *decode* the full 4x4 DTMF keys (as well as MF), however.
@mattblaze fascinating. During design they were probably thinking 'we already have thousands of these pushbutton keypads in the warehouse, may as well use them for this.'