You misread my comment, so I’m not sure how to clarify without explaining exactly what I meant. Sorry for the wall of text but maybe it’s interesting!

I said “It was likely not a regular telephone with a pay-box on it,” which you seem to have read as “there are lots of phones with no pay-boxes.”

What I was saying, which I thought was clarified by the rest of the comment (I was totally wrong, for the record), was that most payphones after the 1980s were a special kind of phone that a store would have to pay someone else to maintain… as opposed to literally just a phone that had a pay-box on it.

Those existed (“just phones with pay-boxes”), is the thing, but I didn’t want to get into details about it before.

Stores used to just have their own phone that they converted to require coins to operate. Then they moved to buying full pay phones with the pay box incorporated. But they couldn’t control everything and by the 1970s it was easy to make free calls using “customer-owned” telephones. In the phone hacking community they were called “COCOTs,” customer-owned, customer-operated telephones. Because they were owned and operated by that store.

Which is a reason why huge companies (like Bell) eventually owned the phones, and each store had to pay a big company to maintain them.

Hopefully that context helps explain what I meant!