The National Museum of Computing
Saturday, 22nd August 2026 from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm
Block H, Bletchley Park, Bletchley MK3 6GX
Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a misfit group figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system.
Phil Lapsley will trace the birth of the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s US monopoly, the discovery of the Achilles heel in Ma Bell’s network, and the advent of the kids and outlaws—the “phone phreaks”—who hacked the telephone network for fun and profit in the 1960s and 1970s. He will conclude with some lessons identified (if not actually learned!) relevant to today.
His book Exploding the Phone, on the history of phone phreaking, was published 2013.