Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [34]
At the time, and especially in later years, the excuses for playing around with blue boxes and the mighty telephone system were as diverse and imaginative as the nicknames. The blue box offered an opportunity to explore the largest collection of computers devised by man. It provided a worldwide introduction to the marriage of hardware and software. It was an intellectual exercise. It was a challenge. It brought satisfaction. It grabbed people’s attention. It appealed to a passion for power. It was a privilege to converse with some of the legendary phone phreaks. Some even liked to explain, with straight faces, that there were practical advantages. Blue boxes, they said, provided quieter, more direct circuits than the phone company could furnish. And though they knew it was illegal very few admitted that they were stealing from AT&T, GTE, or any of the hundreds of small, independent telephone companies. “We thought it was absolutely incredible,” Steve Jobs explained, “that you could build this little box and make phone calls around the world.”
Jobs and Wozniak were inadvertently turned into blue-box builders when Margaret Wozniak glanced at an article in Esquire that she thought would appeal to her older son. She was right. About a fifth the length of a respectable-sized book, the piece was called “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” and was subtitled “A story so incredible it may even make you feel sorry for the phone company.” The story, published in October 1971, was guaranteed to stir anybody’s sense of the fantastic but especially teenagers who had made dummy bombs out of oscillators and played laser beams on bedroom windows.
It told of an underground society composed of phreaks scattered all across America in pools of emotional loneliness whose best companions were voices at the other end of telephone lines. Among the notable characters were Joe Engressia, a blind man in his early twenties who could fool telephone switching equipment by the clarity of his whistle, and Captain Crunch who assumed his name after discovering that the sound from plastic whistles given away in a Cap’n Crunch cereal promotion could be used to help make free toll calls. The 2,600-hertz tone produced by the whistle happened to coincide with the basic signal used by the phone company to direct long-distance calls.
Wozniak tore through the story, intrigued by the authentic ring of the technical detail and the way it dripped with references to frequencies and cycles. Before he had even finished he called Jobs, who was still a sophomore at Homestead High School, and started reading chunks from the magazine. Telephones and the telephone system weren’t anything that the pair had given any serious thought to but blue boxes were clearly electronic and they promised to perform a more than useful function. The Esquire story started the pair on a paper chase and a four-month quest to build a reliable blue box. They peeled up to Palo Alto and rummaged among the stacks in the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center library looking for books that might offer more clues. The telephone company, alarmed by the detail revealed in the story, had asked libraries to remove technical telephone manuals from their shelves. Many of the manuals like The Bell System Telephone Journal and The Bell Laboratories Record where proud scientists had revealed the most intimate details of their work had disappeared. Most of the shelves at SLAC had been picked clean, but the purgers had missed a few vital works