Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay and 30 years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it’s true: just like the people in the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns primarily for the purpose of playing with their payphones. I often brought along my trusty Craig 212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was before cassettes were popular) to record the phone noises and narrate information about them for my friends. I don’t go on phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that this is because I grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone tripping is that all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays and they are really boring.link textThe inspiration for the first generation of phreakers was said to be a man known as Mark Bernay (though that wasn’t his real name). Bernay was identified in Rosenbaum’s article as a sort of electronic Pied Piper who traveled up and down the West Coast of the United States, pasting stickers in phone booths, inviting everyone to share his discovery of the mysteries of “loop-around- pairs,” a mechanism that allowed users to make toll-free calls. Bernay himself found out about loop-around-pairs from a friendly telephone company engineer, link textlink textI, Mr. Skulker, a.k.a. the Midnight Skulker, a.k.a. the phone phreak Mark Bernay, write this newsletter personally and to my own taste so you never know exactly what to expect, but look at my past and my interests for a clue. I was a pretty active “phone phreak” for a time and one of the first computer hackers. A semi-fictional account of my early exploits was published in the October, 1971, Esquire Magazine as part of an article “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” which you can read online from that link. My career and hobby interests have revolved around the computer, telecommunications, and Internet industries, so you know the newsletter is going to have a lot of articles about phone and computer systems and web sites. I’m not much into illegal activity any more; pretty much everything will be legitimate, but hopefully unusual, entertaining, and often something you can actually use.

http://www.webskulker.com/link text