ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

TEL —

Entry written on August 11th.

It would be unfair to heap another bit of recognition onto YIPL/TAP without pointing out a slight-less-known phreaking magazine called TEL. PDF.TEXTFILES.COM has a collection of the seven known issues of TEL, which I will not hesitate to make clear is a mirror of a collection from the Green Bay Professional Packet Radio group. GBPPR is a strange entity; dedicated to hacking, dismissive of many other groups, and of the opinion that my site is the “best site on the internet”. Naturally, I will therefore recuse myself of discussion or judgment of a lot of their website, although I’ll state for the record that I lose hours reading it every time I wander by.

TEL (Telephone Electronics Line) hit the ground running with an overview of Traffic Services Position Systems consoles and just went on from there, covering payphone functionality, credit fraud, and interesting codes/numbers throughout the Bell system. You can see a lot of what made TAP famous and interesting in the pages of TEL as well.

After a mere seven issues, the zine was shut down permanently by Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Booooo! Subscribers were also told to destroy all copies of the magazine in their possession; this didn’t work out all that effectively. But good try, PT&T.

The only bummer is that some of the scans aren’t so hot in the collection; I’ve seen collections of this magazine go by and as soon as I can purchase one, I’ll scan it in for top quality and get that up on the site as a replacement.

As time goes by, I hope more of these little creations show up in my collection. The more the better.


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