The Phantom in the Caller ID ??

The story of a time when a woman’s Caller ID machine went on the fritz and suggested that John F. Kennedy had given her a call.

It’s taken for granted today—and then some—but there was a time when Caller ID was a novel concept for telephones, and there were concerns about privacy that focused on the callers, rather than the recipients of the calls.

Nonetheless, during the 1990s, having a small box that could identify who was calling you became a common feature for many landline phones. At a time when these devices were relatively new, something interesting and funny happened to one of them.

One night, a Michigan woman noticed that her Caller ID machine, made by the company Cidco, had listed 19 separate recent callers—far more than she remembered ringing—and some of those callers were extremely unusual.

“Marilynn, John F. Kennedy is on my box,” Belinda Hines recalled telling her sister on the other end of the line, per?a 1995?Detroit Free Press ?article .

Kennedy was the least of her problems. Other recent callers include Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Payne, Ulysses S. Grant, Ronald Reagan, and Samuel Clemens. Except for Reagan, all were dead.

“Look at these calls, and tell me I’m not crazy,” Hines told the?Free Press?reporter.

So what the heck happened? Apparently, either a glitch or a hack—with the former more likely. In the span of just a few years, the Cidco devices had seen massive uptake, with phone companies around the country offering such devices to customers. Per one assessment, Cidco sold 9 million units by 1996, giving them a 60 percent market share in the Caller ID market. One can imagine, with that many sales, perhaps the QC started to slip.

We often don’t think much about some of the boxes that show up in our houses with the stated goal of making our lives just a little easier—in a smart home world, that’s especially true today. And with the relatively quick uptake of caller ID, a technology that most assuredly made No Doubt’s “Spiderwebs” possible, we sort of accepted the technology quickly without thinking about the downsides.

Does all of this sound weird? Most assuredly. Did Belinda Hines’ Caller ID unit start displaying an internal system test out of nowhere? Probably. But as you’re thinking about what happened, consider being the person who actually owns the number listed as Abraham Lincoln on the Caller ID. (Per the?Free Press?story, a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

That guy probably wished that Caller ID never existed.

? Wanna learn more??Check out our piece on?the history of Caller ID , a technology that looks a lot different today than it did in 1995.