MacLeech They were slower than 1200 baud and predated AOL and most commercial dial-up services.
Along time back I wanted call forwarding on my line but the call center refused to allow me to have claiming the exchange I was connected to didn’t support it, which was BS it is a CLASS service, the 523 exchange supported it and my number was a 463 which was out of the same switch.
So I wanted to do it myself, I walked over to Lauderdale Main picked up the phone and someone inside answered it, I explained I was working on a school assignment based on how telephones worked and would like to have a tour of the CO.
A couple of minutes later the guy answered the door to find a kid standing there and I got my tour.
He explained a lot about the CO and was really proud to show off the new ESS switch that had been installed, a little further into the tour he took me to a couple of racks in the lineup and explained to me this is where the switch is programmed both in the CO and remotely, that got my attention paying close attention I noticed in the rack where 2 Bell 212 modems they had been labled with the phone numbers they where connected to, strange they actually used dialup not leased lines, but good for me.
Over the next few months I dug into as much as I could find out about the Number 4 switch most of which came from Bell System documents known as Practices (BSP’s) that could be ordered by mail for a very small fee.
I hit the mother load when I found one listing the CLI’s for the Number 4.
It was time to get the service I wanted, using a Tandy TRS-80 with a 1200 baud modem I called up one of the modems I had seen, it answered and just did nothing, I figured out if I hit enter it send back a chicken beak.
I typed in the CLI that should caused the switch to send back what type it was and it send back a lot more than that including it’s revision and it’s serial number.
I hung up and over the next few days I wrote out a list of the CLI’s I thought would invoke call forwarding for my line which required entering my number with spaces not dash’s.
It worked I had call forwarding, the best part was when I received my next bill I noticed I wasn’t being billed for the service, great I really pulled one over on the phone company.
But that lack of billing turned out to be my downfall.
What I didn’t know about the #4 was how many modules it has and what those modules do and one of them match’s services to billing it must have found what in the industry is called a exception and that exception got a human involved which got Bell South Security involved.
That meeting was less than fun.
