So did you use a Cap’n Crunch whistle or a Commodore 64?
Hah! I had forgotten about the Cap’n Crunch whistle!
We figured out a different way that worked without the tone.
There was a 1-800 number in the area that if you called them and just stayed on the line without saying anything, they would hang up, and then after about 5 seconds, you would get a dial tone. Then any numbers you called would get charged to the 1-800 number, so it was free long distance, even from a pay phone :)
An interesting read is “The Cuckoo’s Egg” authored by Cliff Stoll.
It has to do with the whistle as well as blue-boxes and also hacking into the AT&T system.
It is so thorough, it goes through when unix became popular how it was used and how hackers
were tracked down as to if they were Unix trained on Bell Unix
or it’s BSD equivalent solely by watching the options they would first invoke using the “ps” command.
The difference in options the hacker would use they would know if to start looking on the east coast or west coast.
A fascinating read.