aka I Hope You Like Text (DTMFer Remix)
Woof. This started out as research for Leon Theremin (who I swear I will get to one day) and spiraled into a whole other arm of the galaxy. I had hoped to garnish the actual comic with sound bytes of dial tones and Hertzes and whatnot, but I plumb ran out of time. Here’s the vast bulk of what I leaned on in my Wikipedia-heavy research.
There are also these gems:
Visual representation of a modem handshake (tweeted some time ago by Kris Straub)
Spectrogram video of a modem handshake
A discussion of whether the door hack and payphone tricks could work in WarGames
More info on old-school phreaking, notably about the Cap’n Crunch whistle trick
Discussion ¬