Secret tricks and closely-guarded info in the pre-internet age

[Barry Admin]

In this thread here, maett and I were talking about the ways you used to be able to get free credits from arcade machines. (Briefly, putting a red-hot bit of wire in the coin slot, using a clicky gas lighter thing, or trying to whack a 2p back up the reject slot.)

These were ace bits of secret information, and you could only learn them from people who wanted to impress you, or who just felt generous enough to share. Without any internet being widely available, some people would hold onto this info, so you could spend years tying to work out the exact methods.

I'm wondering what other tricks and bits of juicy info you can remember. E.g. You might remember secret numbers you could dial from public phone boxes! Perhaps you could tell when a certain fruit machine was about to pay out. All that good stuff.

[Dex Sawash]

Pinball in the coin laundry had the "match" stuck on 10, easy to sabotage last ball for free game.
Lifting the player end an inch or two and letting it slam on the floor may trigger a credit.

Can reach up the inside of a particular style of 1970s soft drink machine and wrestle a can out but you may pierce the can and get all sticky.

Snak Shak on golf course had cans of beer in machine, can buy beer after stores close or underage there there due to no security and remote location. Sadly not the type of machine you could wrestle the cans out.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I heard a rumor you could click a lighter on the old style magnetic-strip prepay meters and it'd give you credit. Probably bollocks, might as well get an insulated screwdriver and bypass it.

One of the reasons mobile phones and cb radios were banned from petrol stations was less about the risk of sparking and fires and more about the pumps being quite sensitive to RF.

[JesusAndYourBush]

In 1989 an Irish guy I got chatting to at Inverness railway station told me how he 'doctored' a 10p piece by cutting a thin strip of aluminium tape and putting it around the edge of the coin, and also covering one side of the coin with the same tape. One particular side needed to be covered, I forget which.  Then when he put the coin into a phone box it registered as 50p.  He knew I was sceptical but there was a phonebox within spitting distance so he demonstrated it, and I can confirm it worked.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I heard some foreign coins that were worth fuck all could be glued together and used in bandits.

[Captain Poodle Basher]

Pinball in the coin laundry had the "match" stuck on 10, easy to sabotage last ball for free game.
Lifting the player end an inch or two and letting it slam on the floor may trigger a credit.

Can reach up the inside of a particular style of 1970s soft drink machine and wrestle a can out but you may pierce the can and get all sticky.

Snak Shak on golf course had cans of beer in machine, can buy beer after stores close or underage there there due to no security and remote location. Sadly not the type of machine you could wrestle the cans out.

When I was living in Munich, I was doing night shifts in a factory - cleaning mostly. We noticed that the drinks machine was kitted out for glass bottles but was stocked with cans. All it took was 1 DM to open the slot and my mate Liam, as he had small hands, could reach in and hold down the barrier so that he could empty the entire machine in about two minutes. We got away with it for a couple of weeks as those methodical Germans just scratched their heads before refilling the machine anyway. We got a telling off but in an admiring fashion for beating the system.

Another wheeze was that Irish and English 5p pieces were the same size as a 1 DM coin so cheap fags, food, drink and phonecalls home were the order of the day. Irish coins were preferred as they were a closer match.

I seem to recall some shenanigans with Irish public telephones as well where you slammed the coin into the slot with the heel of your hand - you had to completely cover the slot to create a vacuum. IIRC, it was to fool the system into thinking you'd put in more than one coin. I remember there being quite a knack to it and it depended on a phone being more susceptible than others.

[holyzombiejesus]

I was told that if you pressed a 50p in to some plasticine, removed it, poured water in to the indentation and froze it, you could use the ice coin in phone boxes. You'd really have to leg it though. One thing that did work but was pointless was rather then dial numbers, just tap the cradle thing that amount of times, leaving a little gap in between digits. It would connect you but it wasn't free or anything.

Another friend told me that when your money came out of the cash machine, don't remove it until the machine starts to take it back and then it won't come out of your bank account.

Then there's the Tomb Raider/ All Saints cheat...

[touchingcloth]

E.g. You might remember secret numbers you could dial from public phone boxes!

I remember one of these, I think it was from the Anarchists' Cookbook, but I could be completely wrong. There was some sequence of numbers you had to dial followed by a random six digit number, and it would connect you to a random number somewhere in the States. Hours if nuisance call fun, especially given that the time we spent waiting for the bus to get into school coincided with highly unsociable hours in the US.

A kid in school discovered - presumably from an older sibling - how to use PowerPoint and Excel macros to open otherwise admin-only utilities on any computer, the most entertaining of which was some application or other that let you send a custom message that would pop up on the screen of any computer you chose in the school's domain. Particularly good fun if you could arrange things such that you knew your message was going to pop up on the screen of someone running a slideshow for a class.

This reminds me of something which isn't really a secret pre-internet trick, but which coincided with mobile phones becoming something which a majority of school kids owned rather than a rare novelty. In a sixth form physics lesson I was tasked with collecting some equipment from the office room adjoining the classroom, and while in there I noticed a landline phone lying on a desk. I quickly dialled my own number from it, and from that point on I had a crafty means of disrupting any classes taking place in that room, the added bonus being that I could always time things so that the call always rang off just as the teacher was reaching to pick up the receiver.

[mjwilson]

At Herne Bay back in the 70s, maybe 80s, there was a Magic Roundabout sort of machine thing, and if you put in 1p or 2p or something, then one of the characters would appear from behind a door. There was a rotating wheel at the bottom, and depending on when you put your 5p in, the ball would fall in one of the slots at the bottom and that would decide which character you saw.

One of the slots on the roulette wheel thingy was a jackpot, in which case all of the characters came out from behind their doors, and the train came out around the bottom of the machine too.

Getting to the point, the secret of getting a jackpot was to put your 10p in when the "jackpot" slot was at the lowest point during the rotation of the wheel.

(Best of luck to anyone trying to make use of this information.)

[Billy]

Not really "pre-internet" but late 90s/very early 00s, the fruit machines at the old Lyme Bay Holiday Camp (now a Tesco's) could be reset using a Sega-style code with the three hold buttons, which would completely reboot the machine and you'd win a few quid on the first go. Learnt it from an older kid who hung round the area.

Then there was being able to watch extra channels on analogue cable by switching the channel back and forth really quickly, you'd get about half a second of it before the feed would cut off. Work up a rhythm and you'd get several seconds of Sky Movies before getting tired and losing the flow.

[Bobtoo]

The swimming pool in Dundee used to have filled rolls and stuff in a carousel type vending machine. You put your money in, pressed the button on the carousel you wanted, then opened the door to take your item. We discovered that if you held the button it would move two spaces instead of one, so it was just a matter of grabbing the first item as it went past.

Another friend told me that when your money came out of the cash machine, don't remove it until the machine starts to take it back and then it won't come out of your bank account.

I read that in a Robert Rankine book, of all places. It wasn't even anything to do with the plot, just thrown in as an aside. I think you have to have a wad of cash coming out and only take the middle notes. He also advised wearing a sombrero so the camera didn't get your face.

[touchingcloth]

D'yer remember disc swappin' on yer PlahStahtion? Waweralltharrabout?!

[Twit 2]

If you smacked a vending machine in with a baseball bat, all the snack would spill out. We'd wear boxing gloves to pick them up. Eventually Schweppes employed a goon to chase after our shiny children's shins.

[touchingcloth]

This is another thing which is definitely not a "trick", but in about 1996 I pinched the CD for a free trial of AOL from the cover of a PC magazine in Tesco, because I'd misunderstood things and thought that the CD contained a sample of the internet. Not software for using your modem and phone line to access the internet, but a little disc filled with porn after porn after porn.

I was wrong, but I must have sank ten hours into the project before that realisation finally dawned.

[Barry Admin]

You did actually get portions of the internet as cover-mounted disks at one point. I remember that being the case with Amiga magazines.

[Ambient Sheep]

One thing that did work but was pointless was rather then dial numbers, just tap the cradle thing that amount of times, leaving a little gap in between digits. It would connect you but it wasn't free or anything.

I knew this trick, and it was far from pointless the day I had to make an urgent phone call from a payphone that had had its dial smashed in and wouldn't rotate. :-)

I got some funny looks from nearby people (cos the bells didn't half make a racket as you tapped), but even funnier ones when I then got through, put my 10p in, and started talking to the person on the other end...

[touchingcloth]

This trick still works - just use the ringpull from a drinks can in a public phone box and you can call any number you like for free.

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

In this thread here, maett and I were talking about the ways you used to be able to get free credits from arcade machines. (Briefly, putting a red-hot bit of wire in the coin slot, using a clicky gas lighter thing, or trying to whack a 2p back up the reject slot.)

These were ace bits of secret information, and you could only learn them from people who wanted to impress you, or who just felt generous enough to share. Without any internet being widely available, some people would hold onto this info, so you could spend years tying to work out the exact methods.

I'm wondering what other tricks and bits of juicy info you can remember. E.g. You might remember secret numbers you could dial from public phone boxes! Perhaps you could tell when a certain fruit machine was about to pay out. All that good stuff.

A strange Scottish friend of mine circa 1997 sent off for a 'how to get rich quick' pamphlet advertised in the back of a paper. Most of the tips involved arcade game scams like the one you mention. So, pre-internet (or most people having it) the information was there, it was just very specialist and you'd have to go out of your way to seek it out.

Re: phone boxes. I can remember attempting to reverse charge call from a phone box to another phone box, or making a self-funded call from one booth to another to see if anyone passing would pick it up. Would teenagers even bother doing that stuff these days? I suppose not. And quite right too. It was a pretty poor source of entertainment tbf.

[touchingcloth]

I remember one of these, I think it was from the Anarchists' Cookbook, but I could be completely wrong. There was some sequence of numbers you had to dial followed by a random six digit number, and it would connect you to a random number somewhere in the States. Hours if nuisance call fun, especially given that the time we spent waiting for the bus to get into school coincided with highly unsociable hours in the US.

Does anyone have any idea what I'm banging on about here? I'm having a fruitless time googling it, but I'm convinced it was a trick which used to work.

In the course of googling I've found a veritable mine of this sort of stuff on textfiles.com, which I hit upon by searching for some of the tricks that did the rounds in various printed documents passed around secretly at school. They're mostly schoolboy fantasies about blowing shit up - here's one of the excellent "tricks" they have to offer:

Code Select Expand

Ways to send a car to Hell            by The Jolly Roger

There are 1001 ways to destroy a car but I am going to cover only
the ones that are the most fun (for you), the most destructive
(for them), and the hardest to trace (for the cops).

- Place thermite on the hood, light it, and watch it burn all the
way through the pavement!

- Tape a CO2 bomb to the hood, axel, gas tank, wheel, muffler,
etc.)

"How to destroy a car: step one, destroy car." Good work.

[Twed]

Yeah, it's the Jolly Roger's Cookbook. http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/

It all seemed real when I was 10. I love the way it even propagates the old banana drugs myth.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Does anyone have any idea what I'm banging on about here? I'm having a fruitless time googling it, but I'm convinced it was a trick which used to work.

In the course of googling I've found a veritable mine of this sort of stuff on textfiles.com, which I hit upon by searching for some of the tricks that did the rounds in various printed documents passed around secretly at school. They're mostly schoolboy fantasies about blowing shit up - here's one of the excellent "tricks" they have to offer:

"How to destroy a car: step one, destroy car." Good work.

Floppies and printouts of that circulated loads at school, and we'd all read it. Pretty sure a teacher caught someone with it and they just got it took off them.

I'd hate to think what would happen now, I think if you were found with a copy of it now it'd be an open and shut case under the terrorism act whether or not any of it would work.

[Paul Calf]

That absolutely did work. I used to use the trick myself. I mean, a friend did.

[Ambient Sheep]

A strange Scottish friend of mine circa 1997 sent off for a 'how to get rich quick' pamphlet advertised in the back of a paper. Most of the tips involved arcade game scams like the one you mention.

How annoying... I was put off applying for any of those back in the 1980s, after my Dad told me a story about a mate of his who sent off for one of those, and got back an envelope with piece of paper in it that simply said "Do as I do".

(See also my favourite money-begging advert in the back of Private Eye which said "Ever wonder how many people send money to these things?  Give me a quid and I'll tell you.")

Re: phone boxes. I can remember attempting to reverse charge call from a phone box to another phone box...

That's why phone boxes started making that irritating "Beep-bop" noise every few seconds when they took an incoming call (from the late 1970s onwards, IIRC) - to alert the operator that she was about to be conned into reverse-charging a phonebox.

[Sebastian Cobb]

How annoying... I was put off applying for any of those back in the 1980s, after my Dad told me a story about a mate of his who sent off for one of those, and got back an envelope with piece of paper in it that simply said "Do as I do".

(See also my favourite money-begging advert in the back of Private Eye which said "Ever wonder how many people send money to these things?  Give me a quid and I'll tell you.")


That's why phone boxes started making that irritating "Beep-bop" noise every few seconds when they took an incoming call (from the late 1970s onwards, IIRC) - to alert the operator that she was about to be conned into reverse-charging a phonebox.

I'm sure when I was growing up they also had a delay on the hangup to stop you using it to pulse-dial. As for the get rich scheme, I think it's a good enough grift I wouldn't feel hard done by really.

[Baby Of The Year]

At Herne Bay back in the 70s, maybe 80s, there was a Magic Roundabout sort of machine thing, and if you put in 1p or 2p or something, then one of the characters would appear from behind a door. There was a rotating wheel at the bottom, and depending on when you put your 5p in, the ball would fall in one of the slots at the bottom and that would decide which character you saw.

One of the slots on the roulette wheel thingy was a jackpot, in which case all of the characters came out from behind their doors, and the train came out around the bottom of the machine too.

Getting to the point, the secret of getting a jackpot was to put your 10p in when the "jackpot" slot was at the lowest point during the rotation of the wheel.

(Best of luck to anyone trying to make use of this information.)

Much to my disgust, I moved back to Herne Bay a year ago after spending my 20s wanting to escape. I can confirm that the Telly-Go-Round is still a 'popular' local attraction.

[Ambient Sheep]

I'm sure when I was growing up they also had a delay on the hangup to stop you using it to pulse-dial.

Yeah, the big oblong steel-grey ones with the grainy LCD screen they brought in sometime in the 80s had that, didn't they?  The one I pulled it off with was one of the older post-decimalisation 2p & 10p (later 5p & 10p) slanty-fronted painted-grey ones.

Dunno why they did that though, because as has been said, you still had to put money in even if you tap-dialled.  Although I've heard before that tap-dialling got you free calls, so maybe at one point it did, but it certainly didn't when I tried it.  Was it possible to go beyond ten pulses to get the equivalent of the A B C D * # codes to access trunks directly then; I thought that was only relevant with touch-tone systems?

* Ambient Sheep pages buzby to the thread.

[Neville Chamberlain]

If you punch 1-4-7-1 into the keypad of a vending machine, you can find out what the person before you bought!

[Danger Man]

I don't recommend doing that in Japan.

[mr beepbap]

Around the early 90s  a few kids in my school found out that if you put money in a phone box phone  it would be held in the body of the main phone/ box but register as a credit and only fall down into separate cash box below when you made a call that was answered. The coin would be returned if the person you rang didn't  answer etc. If you punched the phone hard enoughin the right spot the coin would release into the return tray , but with the credit still registered. We spent many a dinnertime going off to ' bang a phone' and ring chat/sex lines. Wonder if it would still work?

[Small Man Big Horse]

The free phone call scam I remember as a kid (well, when I was about 14 or 15 as it was just when I'd started buying Viz and often called the numbers from the back pages) was dialling the speaking clock, and then hammering (I think) the 0 button, and if you did it enough times you got free credit. My memory is notoriously poor though so it might have been something slightly different, but it definitely worked, a friend I still know was present a good few times when we did it. Of course when we did manage it we didn't really know what to do, so mostly phoned the 0898 joke lines from Viz, one time when I was my own I did call a sex line but it wasn't interactive, just a recording of a quite clearly incredibly bored woman reading a dull sex story that was about as erotic as a dead fish.