Post #2027504
2025-09-17 19:29 UTC
@leymoo
Cool! The same thing happened in #Sweden in 1982, when people discovered some vacant numbers acting like conference calls. They became popularly known as "hot lines". The national phone company subsequently provided some official numbers for the purpose, until 1995.
People would arrange to meet, like your parents did, and there was even a group of more than 1000 youth that congregated in a park in Stockholm, leading to a clash with the police.
You can feed this link to a translator of choice:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heta_linjen_%28Sverige%29
Replies (2)
-
@leymoo@hachyderm.io 2025-09-17 19:45
@leffe This sounds much nicer than the UK’s approach (recently privatised in 1984), which was to introduce premium rate phone numbers so people could run these at a profit ☹️
-
@ahltorp@mastodon.nu 2025-09-17 22:31
@leffe We had a talk about this at the hacker event ”make all” on the 30th anniversary in 2012. Unfortunately the video of the talk is not up any longer, but I should have it laying around somewhere.