Reverse engineering a payphone doesn’t sound like a very interesting project, at least in the United States, where payphones were little more than ruggedized versions of residential phones with a coin mechanism attached. Phones in other parts of the world were far more interesting, though, as this look at the mysteries of a payphone from Israel reveals (in Hebrew; English translation here.)
This is a project [Inbar Raz] worked on quite a while ago, but only got around to writing up recently. The payphone in question was sourced from the usual surplus market channels, and appears to have been removed from service by Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq only shortly before he found it. It was in pretty good shape, and was even still locked tight, making some amateur locksmithing the first order of the day. The internals of the phone are surprisingly complex, with a motherboard that looks more like something from a PC. Date codes on the ch ..
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