Michigan Radio & TV Buzzboard

Does anyone remember or even know what Pipeline was, real briefly I’ll try to explain, back in the early 70’s you could use you home phone to meet people by simply yelling your phone number in between recorded phone company messages, this was sort of a social media thing, In The 70’s the entire SE Michigan area code was 313 so all one had to do was dial 1313 and a looped recording would play then pause for about 10 seconds and everyone that was on the phone at that time would yell out their telephone number, you or anybody that heard a phone number of a person they wanted to meet they would simply call them, When I was a teenager that was the coolest thing to meet girls and set up dates, if you Google Detroit Pipeline Telephone you can find more info about this, It indeed was the social media of the 70’s.

I have never heard of this.
Sounds.. bizarre lol
I'm gonna look into it now!

It seems to me during the mid to late 60's there was a similar thing going on in SW mi. We called it "beepline".You'd dial a certain number and get a rapid beeping sound and yell between beeps. A buddy of mine got quite a few good dates from 'ol beepline...

When I was a kid, the only interesting thing to do on the phone line was dial up the modem while my mom was talking on the phone and listen to her conversation through the computer, lol.

By the time I was a teenager there was instant messaging, etc. But this pipeline sounds a lot more intetesting than AOL

Ha Ha Ha all we had were party lines. You could listen to the neighbors yakking. The would get pissed ( and rightly so) if they heard the click of your phone when you picked up the receiver and didn't hear you put it down.

When I was a kid, the babysitter we had one year, while my Grandmother was on vacation and wasn't available to watch us, was a H*** Wonderful WAMM fan. It was four years after Casey Kasem had an R & B leaning Top 40 show there, his first Top 40 gig, according to Casey. They were popular with all young Demographic groups. They had a request line, CE 9-1420. It was almost always busy. She showed us how it was done. You could yell your phone number out number by number, in between the busy tones. Then you could call the number you heard if you wanted. Kind of a crap shoot. I was way too young for that kind of fun. I still am.

How old are you btw, CK?

I think you could do that with the ***-9982 lines. It was a test line to check for line noise. After the tone, you could "hook up". Too young for that too. Never heard anyone on those lines. It was secret of Ma Bell. Not many people knew, except shy geeks.

Old enough to be your Grandfather, most likely, stopmeister. Casey worked at WAMM in 1957, so this was 1961, I remember that "Quarter To Three" was #1.