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love with the phone system. His hobby, he said, was what he called ‘phone tripping’: he liked to visit telephone switching stations and quiz the company engineers about the workings of the system. Often, he knew more than they did. He also liked to tour the switching stations. Being blind, he couldn’t see anything, but he would run his hands down the masses of wiring coiled around the banks of tandems and switches. He would feel the circuitry, learning how the links were made just by feeling his way through the connections in the wiring. He probably gained more knowledge than most sighted visitors.

Joe had moved to Memphis after leaving Florida because the city had some ‘interesting’ local independent phone districts. Like many phreakers, Joe was fascinated by the independents – small, private phone companies not controlled by Bell – because of their idiosyncrasies. Though all the independents were linked to Bell as part of the larger North American phone network, they often used different equipment (some of it older) or had oddities within the system that phreakers liked to explore.

By that time the really top-flight phreakers were more interested in the phone company than just making free calls. They had discovered that the system, with all its links and connections and switches, was like a giant electronic playground, with tunnels from one section to another, with slides that could take calls from North America to Europe and back again, with ladders that could reach to satellites that could bounce calls to anywhere in the world.

One of the early celebrated figures was a New-York-based phreaker who used to call his girlfriend in Boston on weekends using his blue box – but never directly. First he would call a 1-800 number somewhere in the country, MF out of it on to the international operator’s circuit and surface in Rome, where he would redirect the call to an operator in Hamburg. The Hamburg operator would assume the call originated in Rome and accept the instructions to patch it to Boston. Then the phreaker would speak to his girlfriend, his voice bouncing across the Atlantic to a switch in Rome, up to Hamburg and then back to Boston via satellite. The delay would have made conversation difficult but, of course, conversation was never really the point.

Few phreakers ever reached that level of expertise. The community was never huge – there were probably never more than a few hundred

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