Phil Lapsley > Quotes

“Engineers are funny animals. If you tell an engineer about a problem, any problem, his first instinct is to measure it. Tell an engineer you don’t love him anymore and he’ll ask for a graph of your love over time so that he can understand exactly how big the problem is and when it started.”
― Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

“Yet one title caught his eye: “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.”
― Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

“Compared to the phone phreaks, the Bell Labs engineers were laboring under a great disadvantage, for they understood how the system was supposed to work and that blinded them to how the system actually did work—and therefore how it could be made to do things it was never designed to do.”
― Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

“If idle hands are the devil’s tools, then a clever teenager with idle hands and a methodical personality is the devil’s munitions factory.”
― Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

“Eight years, a protracted FCC hearing, and a lawsuit to get the right to use a rubber cup on a telephone mouthpiece. The beautiful thing about teenagers is that they rarely pay attention to this kind of stuff.”
― Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell