Addiction

[BarryBobPosthole]

Yeah, I was one of those. I used to hang out at the Central Bar back room pool and snooker room in my hometown when I was a kid where I learned to shake rattle and roll on a pinball machine. For several years I played pinball a LOT.

This weekend I downloaded a very cool pinball app on my iPad and I've already made the top of the hall of fame list on one machine and i'm climbing on another.

Yes, I had a misspent youth and yeah, I have addiction issues.

BKB

[Thumper]

We used to have to pull a sneak maneuver to play pinball. When I was a kid, you had to be 18 to play. If ya' got busted, the proprietor would lose his license (all the machines were licensed as "gambling/gaming devices"). BUT ... since my best buddy's dad owned a bar, we tore it up when the bar was closed. Man, to this day I can still smell that stale beer, cigarette smoke and dirty ashtrays.

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/sick/puke-smiley-emoticon.gif

[LJ3]

I absolutely love playing pinball. I was pretty damn good back in the day. I could dig a ball out of the hole pretty damn well.

Does the electric version give you that kind of action?

[Bwana]

Pretty sure I could buy myself a pretty darn nice fishing rod & reel with all the coin I spent on pinball back in the day.

When we ran out of our own money, friends and I used to search the road ditches, etc. to find pop bottles that folks had thrown out and then take them back to the store for the $0.10 deposit they gave out. All that money was saved up and converted into quarters to play the pinball machines located in the back room of the cafe. And then one day one of the older kids told us about how if you put a penny on the train tracks it would be squished to the size of a quarter once it was ran over. Low and behold, most of those slugs would trick the pinball machine into giving a credit but it would usually reject the slug after the credit showed up. As we learned it was great when the slug was rejected because folks were not impressed to open the coin bin only to find it full of worthless slugs. To this day I recall the stern look on my dad's face when at the supper table he asked me if I was involved with using the slugs. Rest assured I never was AFTER that time. :)

[BarryBobPosthole]

I absolutely love playing pinball. I was pretty damn good back in the day. I could dig a ball out of the hole pretty damn well.

Does the electric version give you that kind of action?

Its as close as you can get to real without having to wipe the moisture ring off the glass from your beer. You can bump it and tilt it too.

The app is called pinball arcade.
BKB

[Thumper]

That reminds me of a story Bwana. With six kids in the family, and me being the oldest, it was total hell trying to talk to my girlfriend on the phone at home. Back in the day, we could spend hours on the phone! Since cordless phones didn't exist and cell phones weren't even thought of back then, I really had no privacy. Not only could I not get very far away from where the phone was wired into the wall, but my punk-ass little brothers and sisters would constantly be picking up the extension to listen in to all the "love-talk". ;)

I don't remember where I learned the trick, but I learned that if you spit on a penny and dropped it into the slot (nickle slot? I don't remember) on a pay phone, it would register as a dime (which is what a call cost back in the mid-60's). I'd go down to the corner pay phone, spit on a penny, drop it in the slot (sometimes it took 2-3 tries) and my girl and I could talk forever without interruption!

Many years later, I asked a telephone repairman how that worked and although I can't remember what he said exactly, it had something to do with the weight of the coin as to which chute it would go into. The spit on the penny would provide enough drag on the coin to slow it down and the mechanism would "think" it's a lighter dime and direct it to that particular chute.

Although I never tried it personally, I remember my buddy used to tell me you could make long distance calls by carrying a dime (or quarter?) with a hole in the top. To make a call, he'd tie a thread through the hole, then when the operator told him how much money to add, he'd drop the quarter in, pull it back a ways, let it slide down again and each time he did it, the little bell would ring. That told the operator how much money was being inserted. Once he hit the correct amount, he'd pull it back out and keep the quarter 'til next time.

With the electronics we use on everything these days, I'd think machines are a bit harder to "trick" than the old mechanical devices we used to have.

[Arty]

Here's a thump story of my own. :)

When I was about 12-13 the local grocery store had a Coke machine out front (like they all did, but very few do now). 12 ounce can was .50 cents.
Somehow - and I don't remember who or how it was figured out, you could put 5 nickels in the machine, it would give you a Coke (or mellow yellow or whatever else was in there) AND also drop a quarter in the change slot!!!!!

My and my neighbor, who I'm still friends with 25 plus years later, got a butt load of nickels from every couch cushion, piggy bank, and car cigarette ashtray we could find, rode our bikes up there one night and EMPTIED it out. We had backpacks, and pillow cases. Can't remember how many we hauled home, but we were loaded down.
And our pockets were lighter coming home, since they were full of quarters and not nickels.

[Buckrub]

That reminds me of a story Bwana. With six kids in the family, and me being the oldest, it was total hell trying to talk to my girlfriend on the phone at home. Back in the day, we could spend hours on the phone! Since cordless phones didn't exist and cell phones weren't even thought of back then, I really had no privacy. Not only could I not get very far away from where the phone was wired into the wall, but my punk-ass little brothers and sisters would constantly be picking up the extension to listen in to all the "love-talk". ;)

I don't remember where I learned the trick, but I learned that if you spit on a penny and dropped it into the slot (nickle slot? I don't remember) on a pay phone, it would register as a dime (which is what a call cost back in the mid-60's). I'd go down to the corner pay phone, spit on a penny, drop it in the slot (sometimes it took 2-3 tries) and my girl and I could talk forever without interruption!

Many years later, I asked a telephone repairman how that worked and although I can't remember what he said exactly, it had something to do with the weight of the coin as to which chute it would go into. The spit on the penny would provide enough drag on the coin to slow it down and the mechanism would "think" it's a lighter dime and direct it to that particular chute.

Although I never tried it personally, I remember my buddy used to tell me you could make long distance calls by carrying a dime (or quarter?) with a hole in the top. To make a call, he'd tie a thread through the hole, then when the operator told him how much money to add, he'd drop the quarter in, pull it back a ways, let it slide down again and each time he did it, the little bell would ring. That told the operator how much money was being inserted. Once he hit the correct amount, he'd pull it back out and keep the quarter 'til next time.

With the electronics we use on everything these days, I'd think machines are a bit harder to "trick" than the old mechanical devices we used to have.

Almost....

If you cut a strip off of the phone book about 1/2 inch wide and 6 inches long.....and slid it down the dime slot....and put in a penny while simultaneously pressing the coin return toggle and sliding the paper strip up and down, you'd break dial tone and make a call for a penny.

[Thumper]

50-CENTS!!!??? Dang whipper-snapper! ;)

I remember when Cokes were a nickle, then went up to 6-cents and later 7-cents (the cost of a Popsicle was always the same as a Coke for some reason). It was such a hassle to always need pennies, those prices didn't last long and they settled on 10-cents. Anyway, the gas station on the corner had an old ramp type Coke machine and the station closed at 6:00 pm. My buddies and I always carried one of those collapsible metal cups and a "church key" (can/bottle opener to youse younger dufes). We'd ride our bikes down there after hours, pop the tops and hold our cups under the neck of the bottle for a freebie Coke.

Here's what they looked like. The mechanism would clamp down on the rear of the bottle and release it when you inserted your nickel. If you pulled on the bottles, they'd slide forward about an inch or two, enough to get the church key on the cap. Once we did our thing, there'd always be a few empty bottles behind that door. :D

http://www.thecrashdoctor.com/Images/Old-Coke-machine-3b.jpg

[Thumper]

Ha ha! This is fun! A year or so ago, I bought a box of little crap (mostly Cracker Jacks type toys) for a buck at an estate sale. I was going to sell them as a "lot" and try to make a buck or two. But, there was one odd-ball toy in the box. It was just a little plastic whistle that you'd get from a box of Cap'n Crunch Cereal. It didn't really fit in with my little collection of Cracker Jacks toys, so I considered throwing it away. For some reason I stuck it in my desk drawer and pretty much forgot about it. Later on I pulled it out of the drawer and on a whim, decided to see if it had any collector value. Sonofabitch! Those little pieces of crap were bringing good money! I listed mine as an auction and sold it for $65.00!

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3185/2763682676_00a3e068e8_z.jpg


(I just checked eBay and one just sold on 12/20/2015 for $50.00)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Cereal-Premium-Capn-Crunch-Bosun-Whistle-1960s-Phone-Hacker-/231763027471?hash=item35f627260f%3Ag%3Ap~4AAOSwHQ9 WU6yo&nma=true&si=7eU%252BumqrbUiCJjNClk9lC1hm%252F0A%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557


And here's why they're a collector's item: (Who'da thunk it?)

http://telephone-museum.org/telephone-collections/capn-crunch-bosun-whistle/

2600 cycles per second

In the original analog networks, short-distance telephone calls were completed by sending relatively high-power electrical signals through the wires to the end office, which then switched the call. For long-distance telephone calls, the Bell System used a selection of tones sent over the trunks to control the system. In addition to dialing instructions, the system also included a number of other tones that represented various commands or status. 2600 Hz, the key to early phone phreaking, was the frequency of the tone sent by the long-distance switch indicating that the user had gone on-hook (hung up the phone). This normally resulted in the remote switch also going on-hook, freeing the trunk for other uses. In order to make free lines easy to find, the 2600 Hz tone was continually played into free trunks. If the tone was sent manually by the local user into the phone line, it would trigger the remote switch to go on-hook, but critically, the local switch knew he was still off-hook because that was signaled electrically, not by the tone (which their local switch ignored). The system was now in an inconsistent state, leaving the local user connected to an operational long-distance trunk line. With further experimentation, the phone phreaks learned the rest of the signals needed to dial on the remote switch.

John Thomas Draper (born 1943), also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman (after Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal mascot), is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a legendary figure within the computer programming world and the hacker and security community. While Draper was driving around in his Volkswagen Microbus to test a pirate radio transmitter he had built, he broadcast a telephone number to listeners as feedback to gauge his station's reception. A callback from Denny Teresi resulted in a meeting that caused him to delve into the world of the phone phreaks. Teresi and a large percentage of the phone phreaks were blind. Learning of his electronic capability, they wanted him to build a multifrequency tone generator (the "blue box") to gain easier entry into the AT&T system, which was controlled by tones. Then they would not have to use an organ and cassette recordings of tones to get free calls. A blind boy, Josef Carl Engressia, Jr., who had taken the moniker of Joybubbles had perfect pitch and was able to identify the exact frequencies. They informed him that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz, the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready and available to route a new call. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build blue boxes: electronic devices capable of reproducing other tones used by the phone company. Teresi hosted a long-running radio show under the name "Dennis Terry", and operated an oldies record store in San Jose, CA. Draper has long maintained a nomadic lifestyle, as of May 2013 he resides in Las Vegas, Nevada. Engressia passed away on August 8, 2007 (aged 58).

[airbud7]

Our neighborhood/and most of town had milk delivered to there door steps in the early morning hours and we would sneak around and take all the chocolate we could find....bottles like this

6344

that was some good cold chocolate milk for a 10/11 year old boy ;)

[Thumper]

Yep, I remember we used to have milk, eggs and cheese delivered. We'd leave the empty milk bottles at the front door and pick up the fresh milk first thing in the morning. (Ya' had to get it early in Florida!)