Evan Doorbell

Evan Doorbell was the pseudonym used by a well-known but somewhat mysterious phone phreak of the 1970s. His claim to fame is the vast archive of high-quality tape recordings he made of the telephone network of the period, many of which have in recent years been edited and narrated by Doorbell himself, and presented on the World Wide Web at fellow phreak, Mark Bernay's, web site, Phone Trips ().

In keeping with the phone phreak tradition of self-imposed anonymity, not much is known about Doorbell outside of what he has revealed in his phone-tape presentations. Apparently he was born and raised around Hempstead, New York circa 1957, and began his adventures in phone phreaking as a young teenager, around 1969 or 1970.

He eventually became part of a kind of informal phreaking club called "Group Bell" with other young phone phreaks, who also produced telephone-themed comedy recordings and short musical "jingles" performed by Doorbell himself on his ARP Odyssey synthesizer. Doorbell apparently traveled quite a lot throughout the 1970s, moving from Long Island to New York City, Atlanta, and Raleigh, North Carolina where he did some work as a disk jockey in a disco.

Unfortunately, Doorbell's personal history according to the phone tapes ends rather abruptly in Raleigh in 1979; almost nothing is known about his personal life after this point.

Other than a recent phone tape series recorded in Quebec in 2001, his current whereabouts are unknown, but he is nevertheless alive and well, and still active in producing new phone-tapes for the Web.

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