The Phone Phreaks in Their Own Words

A collection of old zines

Yesterday we published a review of Phil Lapsley's Exploding the Phone, a history of the old phone phreak subculture. If you didn't see the article because you were off having fun on Memorial Day, you ought to read it now. If you did see it, you may recall a reference to the publication known initially as Youth International Party Line and then as TAP, a zine run by some phreaks involved with the New Left group known as the Yippies.

As a postscript to the review, I'll point you to this site, where back issues of the zine have been put online. Unfortunately, they were put there by a raging anti-Semite, and to get to the pdfs you have to scroll past a long, dumb rant about The Jews. But about a third of the way down the page, the publications themselves are posted, and they're a pretty interesting window into that time and milieu. Recommended, despite the rancid context.