It is rare that you can pinpoint the date of an MIT hack so many years later but this was marked by what happened the week later which was the Blizzard of '78. The week before that famous blizzard we also had a blizzard which people forget about. It was Sunday night - Monday morning about 2:00 AM. This is the only shift the physical plant people had off all week. The campus was silent.
A team of 4 Bexleyites went out to acquire a phone booth. I had wormed my way into this hack as the 4th member. The phone booth was in the basement level of stairwell in Building 13. It was a classic American phone booth think TARDIS but American. It looked like this but it had wood trim over a metal frame and glass panels on its sides. It was free standing and not bolted down. It looked something like this:
It only had two pairs of wires coming in the top, one pair for power (for the light bulb inside which was switched on/off by the folding door) and the other pair was for the phone itself. One of us cut the wires and since the power wire was live he got a shock.
We easily acquired two carts and tilted the booth onto the carts. Then we started rolling it through the basement hallways towards Memorial Drive. We finally got to an exit door which was up a few steps but the problem was it was a double door with a jamb in the middle. We couldn't get the booth out that door. Of course we had tools (this is MIT!) and one of us unscrewed the jamb. Then took the booth out onto the sidewalk. Remember it is snowing hard as it is a major storm. We were rolling the whole thing towards Mass. Ave. and past the great court.
Then a campus police car drives past us. I don't know if they ever saw us through the snow or just didn't care. Seeing four guys rolling a large boxy object in a snowstorm on MemDrive at 2AM at MIT was nothing to concern the Campies. Anyhow, we rolled it all the way to the alley in back of Bexley Hall. We brought it down the backstairs into the Bexley Space Center (our basement party area). We put it right next to the main stairway (50 entrance).
One of us knew the dorm phone wiring and which phone lines were not used. He connected the phone wires to the dorm phone wires but nothing happened. The next day in a stroke of genius (or just a stroke) I thought of putting a dime in the phone. I put one in and I got a dial tone! From that point on it worked like any other dorm phome. The dial tone was always there as there was never a signal from Ma Bell to release the dime.
We could use the phone booth to call anywhere in Bexley (or on campus) and it could get calls (once we told everyone the dorm phone number we used). It turned to be very handy a couple weeks later. Only a week (or 2?) after the '78 blizzard we had a band party in the lounge area. If you were in the phone booth with its folding door closed you could actually talk and hear even with the band playing across the room. We would call around Bexley telling everyone to come down for the party.
Anyhow, the sad ending is about a week or two later it disappeared. No one no knows what happened to it. My two suspicions are the physical plant people saw it and took it away or someone tried to use it as a real phone and it didn't work and reported it. We stole a phone booth and got it working on the dorm phone system. My favorite hack!
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