Phreaking out ma bell

Ralph Barclay was walking through the engineering library at Washington State University, just minding his own business, when it called out to him. He couldn\´t say why, it just did. It was a booklet, about 18 by 23 centimeters and maybe a centimeter thick, on display in the library\´s new periodicals section. Its pale blue cover proclaimed it to be the November 1960 issue of something called The Bell System Technical Journal. It had been out for less than a week. Barclay looked at the table of contents printed on its cover. Most of the articles could put even the hardest of hard-core geeks to sleep at 20 paces: "Magnetic Latching Relays Using Glass Sealed Contacts," "Molecular Structure in Crystal Aggregates of Linear Polyethylene," or the ever popular "Ionic Radii, Spin-Orbit Coupling, and the Geometrical Stability of Inorganic Complexes."