Photos of payphones from around the world. More international payphone photos. Stylized payphones from Brazil. Seen enough photos? Then perhaps you'd like to start calling some of them? [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 on Jan 2, 2008 - 11 comments

"The streets of 2030's New York remain the only venues not under the thumb of the monolithic corporations. Manhattan’s three major hacker gangs have developed black-market technology that enables them to jack into the phone network though the payphone nodes, and redirect the payment deposited into that phone into their own coffers." The premise of a new cyberpunk novel? Nope. A new street game you can play with your friends.
posted by maniactown on Sep 24, 2006 - 16 comments

50 Cents, Please. Remember When A Call Cost a Dime? Soon: the 50 cent NYC local phone call. The poor state of payphones in NYC has long fascinated me. Supposedly, most don't work because of vandalism (often, the dial tone works, but the you lose your coins), but I suspect Verizon just wants to maximize cell phone sales. And I suspect the payphone is an endangered species for health reasons. What's the state of the pay phone in your city?
posted by ParisParamus on Mar 12, 2002 - 38 comments

Call the Vatican. Or Boston Public Library. Or Grand Central Station. A few friends of mine used to use this tactic to see what the weather is like. This is a database of public pay-phone numbers, along with location and occasional sundry information. Read, call, and contribute!
posted by atfrost on Aug 1, 2001 - 14 comments

The Phone Losers of America have recently been floating a bunch of interesting telephony links. First, there's a great tutorial on How Telephones Work. LincMad Telephone Area Codes & Splits covers the Balkanization of American area codes. And of course, there's the ever-present Pay Phone Directory and the Telephone Prefix Location List. Lastly, those ten codes (e.g. 10-10-220, 10-10-321) are covered at The Ten Project.
posted by tdecius on Oct 7, 1999 - 0 comments