Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Oregon Trail Hallmark ornament
Here's a link to a YouTube video of the Oregon Trail Hallmark ornament in operation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPA2sWnrDmc (Start at 3:30 in the video if you want to skip the unboxing part.) The display appears to be a LED backlit lenticular image, which requires viewing from different lateral angles to switch between two surprisingly high-resolution images: the Oregon Trail menu screen, and the status message, "You Have Died from Dysentery". It's a clever design. Power consumption from the (3) 1.5V LR44 'button' batteries is kept to a minimum this way. Some people have hacked these Hallmark 'Keepsake' ornaments by instead attaching (3) AAA or AAA batteries hardwired to the battery terminals. Three such batteries--especially if they're long-life lithium cells--would likely keep the ornament illuminated for weeks or longer. Hallmark has long been innovatively incorporating electronics technology into its greeting cards, holiday ornaments, and other products. In the early 1990's they introduced the first greeting card with a digital audio recorder/playback device incorporated into a surprisingly thin greeting card for $7.95 retail. The idea was you could record ten-second audio message to your loved one in a greeting card, which when opened would play to them loud and clear. Clever! Phone phreaks and hackers quickly recognized this as a golden opportunity and removed the tiny electronics module from the card and used it to record Automated Coin Totalling System (ACTS) coin-deposit audio signals emanating from the handset earpiece on payphones of local exchange carriers--or better yet from the handset of a phone you called and then depositing more quarters because the ACTS tones were attenuated in the payphone earpiece but were loud and clear in the called party's phone which allowed better recording quality. Then the user could make payphone calls and play back the recorded coin-deposit tones into the handset's microphone by pressing the module's momentary switch to spoof the phone company's ACTS system after it verbally prompted them to "Please Deposit 25 Cents For The First 5 Minutes" (or much more money for Long-Distance calls) in lieu of depositing coins. Such a device, in its various incarnations spanning more than three decades while ACTS was in use, was called a Red Box by the phreak/hacker community. The so-called Hallmark Red Box was hands-down the least expensive and simplest way to create a Red Box, and was popularized by an article entitled "A Gift From Hallmark" that was published in 2600 Magazine back then. I'd read in an electronics trade publication that Hallmark bought millions of digital audio recording chips from Information Storage Devices, Inc. for use in a talking greeting card they planned to release on a certain date. On that day I bought one as soon as the Hallmark store nearest me opened. Phone company payphones by design never returned change for unused call minutes. Cheating callers out of their change was more profitable. With many millions of payphone calls made each day around the U.S. back then, these unearned profits quickly added up to millions of dollars per week for local phone companies and A&T. Some people would keep a running total of how much money the phone company stole from them this way and use their 'credits' to make payphone calls with their Red Box. This led to controversy about who was actually defrauding whom. Thanks for the memories, Hallmark! -bernieS
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bernieS