The Death of Amos Joel, a Truly Old-School Hacker and Phone Phreak

(((Dr. Joel has recently passed on, but this oral testimony of his, dating from the early 90s, speaks for itself.)))

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_E._Joel,_Jr.

http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/history_center/oral_history/abstracts/joelab.html

JOEL: Well, I had friends who– I lived on West 86th Street in New York from 1929 on.
And so I had a number of friends there. One of the very interesting incidents was that during the early 'thirties, I set up a telephone system along– Eighty-sixth
Street, then as now, was made up of a lot of tall apartment buildings, you know,
15-story apartment buildings. And we all lived in these buildings.

So I set up my own telephone system and ran wires down the back fences along West Eighty-
sixth Street. [Chuckling] And had a little knife–used knife switches–for switches and manual switches. And we had a switchboard at one end and one at the other end of the block. We had wires going up the sides of these buildings. At that time
I acquired telephones by going into empty apartments and taking them because the Telephone Company would leave them, and there were plenty of empty apartments during the Depression. So there were plenty of telephones available.

One of the incidents that I remember the most, a friend and I were sitting in my apartment, and, you know, we weren't using the telephone system at that time. But the telephone system went to about eight people. And all of a sudden the telephone bell rang. We couldn't figure out who it would be. So I answered the telephone, and it came in clear and louder and clearer than ever before. And, you know, I immediately said, "Oh, it's never been this clear before," I told my friend who was sitting with me. And the man at the other end said, "This is the telephone man. Where are you located?" [Laughter] He didn't like the fact that we ran the telephone wires down along the cables in the back of the fences where the
Telephone Company wires were.

ASPRAY: I see.

JOEL: And then I think he also looked– One of the switchboards was in a first-floor apartment in one of the buildings, and I think he noticed in there were telephones that belonged to New York Telephone that shouldn't be. [Laughter] So I think he wanted to re-acquire them. So we had to give our telephones back to the
Telephone Company. [Chuckling] But we had a good time with that system. So I remember that. It was fun building it and trying to solve some of the problems.

ASPRAY: I read in your Kyoto speech that you had started by a quite early age–was it 13? -
-reading patents.

JOEL: Yeah. (...)

JOEL: ... in order to earn a little extra money and so forth in the Depression days, I remember working in a lunchroom–a lunch place–on the campus. And then I worked in the dormitory office. And that's very important because the dormitory office had a switchboard, and I ran the switchboard.

ASPRAY: Ah hah!

JOEL: And of course I enjoyed that. Doing all kinds of fancy things like connecting people together that didn't know each other and what not. [Laughter] To show what you could do with a switching system.

JOEL: ... my first date with my wife, they had an open house–my wife-to-be–you could bring your lady friends up to your room. It was called "open house." And so she came up, and the first thing I did was I pulled out one of these patent drawings. And they're tremendous.
I mean, they're like 50 or 60 sheets. And what I had done is pasted them together so that it was one great big roll of drawings. I had to lay it out on the floor for her.
And I explained to her that–it took like an hour or so–but I went through all this business. I said, "It takes all that to give you dial tone in this latest type of switching system." [Chuckling] Which was the latest crossbar switching system.
She claims I took her later to a crossbar office in New England Tel. I think it was a step-by-step office, but that's beside the point. [Chuckling] At any rate–

ASPRAY: Did she have a science–

JOEL: –she went home and told her father that I was crazy. [Laughter] But, I mean, I was into it that way.

And I remember also the other thing I had in school. I had it on my wall next to my desk: the patent drawing of the coin district juncture of the panel system. Because people kept coming in my room all the time and saying, If you do this, can you get this call through for nothing? What will happen? And they had all kinds of ways, you know, but the most common way was you'd tilt the– You had a protractor on the bottom of the telephone booth, and you'd tilt it so many degrees and put pennies in it, and they'd sound like nickels or something.
[Laughter] But they'd ask me all kinds of, you know– Could you do this, that and the other so the wires wouldn't get you? And I had this diagram there to keep referring to it. It was a diagram of a circuit that was up on the wall that took care of this. [Chuckling] So I was doing that kind of stuff at the time.

... And the people that I later met at Bell
Laboratories when I started were all great guys, but they were all inventors. You know, they were almost the kind of guy you'd see in the back room putting things together this way and that way. The only difference was that they worked for a big company. In fact, you had to work for a big company like that–it wasn't that big in those days, but it was big relatively–you had to do that to do this kind of thing. Switching is not really–a big switching system–is not something you can very easily put together on your own. It takes a lot of people and a lot of work.
But the fellas that I knew– Of course I had an unusual–when I started working there–very, very unusual situation. Because I came in knowing a helluva lot about the subject, you know, and they never saw anybody like that before, you know, in the whole time Bell Labs had been in existence. So that was very unusual.

By the way, the services were great, too, at Bell
Laboratories. You know, not only the library service, but when you became a member of technical staff you had a button on your desk. And so anytime you wanted a new drawing out of the file, you just pushed the button and a messenger came. You told them what you wanted or if you needed sugar or something, they'd go get whatever you had to get. A pack of cigarettes or something. I mean, you know, whatever. [Chuckling]

... then one famous day–we're talking now about two or three years later–Alan Turing came. He visited the
Labs, and we all had a chance to meet him. I just met him briefly one afternoon kind of thing.

ASPRAY: Why was he there?

JOEL: Well, he was there because he was working on this–what do you call it?–
Colossus Machine in England and working on ciphers and codes and trying to break them, same as we were.

ASPRAY: Was your group familiar with what he was doing before he came?

JOEL: No, no. In fact, I didn't even learn anything from him at that time. Most of the things I've learned about him have come since he's dead.

And then the fateful day came along–I guess it was in 1947–when they got us all up, all the members of the technical staff that they could fit in, up to the auditorium and told us about the transistor. And then they sent us back and said,
What can you do with it? Then I started thinking, Boy, this is really the opportunity....