Motorola phones

In a recent conversation, I thought back to an old Motorola phone I bought in the 1990’s.  It was old when I bought it. I paid $35 for the Motorola 8000.  Upon leaving the gentleman’s apartment, I really came to suspect it was stolen. Mostly, it was the neighbour opening the door and yelling at me, “Did you buy stolen goods from him?”

At the time of my purchase I was quite interested in phreaking. I read a document, I downloaded from a BBS, called “the Motorola Bible”. Here’s a copy:motorola

Reading up on it, I found it was possible to connect to pins on the phone and put it into “service mode”, which would allow one to listen in on cell phone conversations.  Of course, this isn’t possible any more, as cell phone technology has gone all digital, like, forever ago.

I got that baby home, removed the empty space from the top of the battery pack and soldered the pins together. Much to my surprise, it worked! Which is where the story ends. As with quite a few ‘;projects’ I start, I lose complete interest when I get it working.

The phone is long, long gone along with analog cell phone service. Fortunately, before I lost interest, I took some pictures of the device. Some years later, I managed to upload them to a Flickr account, I’ve long since lost the password to, along with the original pictures. Perhaps, another day for my Deathstar disk story.