voicebox

When I was a teenager, my mother thought I spent too much time on the telephone — you know, talking to girls and stuff. This was over and above the hours I spent on bulletin boards online. So when she left me alone in the house, she took the phone with her.

This didn’t stop me. Actually, going up the road to use the nearest pay-phone didn’t occur to me (and obviously, this was a decade before mobile telephony become commonplace). Instead, I made a “phone”. Cutting open a couple of cables and twisting various copper wires together, I managed to connect my 1200 baud modem to our stereo system. The only microphone I had was in a standalone, portable tape recorder that had no outputs, so I pre-recorded various phrases on different tapes, to be played back by the more integrated tape deck of the stereo. Manually issuing Hayes Smartmodem “ATD” commands from my computer, I’d make calls, and when people would answer, I’d override the modem to keep the line open and frantically play and swap cassettes through the tape deck, trying to have a “conversation” with them. I remember getting through 20 seconds of one such strangely mediated conversation before the person on the other end realised they weren’t talking “directly” to me.

I had a strange childhood.

[ tags: childhood, communication, family, hacking, modem, repression, telephone ]