Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [35]
Building a reliable blue box was quite another matter. To start, the pair decided to build an oscillator to generate tones that they planned to record on cassette tape. They designed an oscillator from some circuits described in Popular Electronics but soon discovered that it was incredibly difficult to get stable tones. Oscillators were temperamental and susceptible to changes in temperature and the telephone company’s equipment wasn’t tolerant of shoddy work. They spent hours tuning the oscillator by hand, trying to hit the right notes and Jobs measured the results with his frequency counter. Finally, they recorded the tones they needed to make telephone calls but still couldn’t get the cassette recorder to fool the phone company.
Unable to tame the vagaries of the wave forms and analog circuitry of oscillators, Wozniak turned his attention to a digital design. Though a digital blue box was far trickier to build than an oscillator, it provided more precise tones. Wozniak was spurred by the informal competition that had developed among phone phreaks to build compact blue boxes. He had to design circuits that would convert pressure on the push buttons into clear, consistent tones. To help with some of the arithmetic he wrote a program to run on one of the Berkeley computers.
After some weeks, he had wired his first digital blue box. Thanks to a clever trick, the box, which contained a small speaker that ran off a 9-voIt battery, didn’t have a special power switch. Any of the push buttons turned on the power. Jobs and Wozniak tried to place their first call to Wozniak’s grand-mother in Los Angeles but managed to dial the wrong number, presumably leaving some disconcerted Angeleno wondering why anyone should shriek, “It actually works. It actually works. We called you for free.”
For Wozniak and Jobs, cornering Captain Crunch, tracking down the uncrowned King of the Phreaks, became as obsessive as the quest to build a reliable box. They called the author of the Esquire story who politely refused to reveal Crunch’s real name. Jobs then heard that Crunch had given an interview on a Los Gatos FM radio station. So the pair trooped off to the station and again were told that the name couldn’t be disclosed. Finally, the world of phreaking being small and intimate, another Berkeley phreak told Wozniak that he had worked with Captain Crunch at KKUP, an FM radio station in Cupertino, and that his real name was John Draper. Jobs called KKUP, asked for Draper, and was told by the receptionist that he could leave a message. A few minutes later the phone rang: Captain Crunch speaking. They made a date to meet in Wozniak’s dormitory room at Berkeley, where he had enrolled in 1971, a few nights later.
What virtually amounted to a papal visit was treated as such. When Jobs arrived from Los Altos, Wozniak was sitting on the edge of his bed scarcely able to conceal his excitement, and several others were waiting for the knock on the door. When they heard the sound Wozniak opened the door to find a ragged figure standing in the corridor. He wore jeans and sneakers, had hair that ran amok, an unshaven face, eyes that squinted, and several missing teeth. Wozniak recalled: “He looked absolutely horrid and I said, ‘Are you Captain Crunch?’” Draper replied: “I am he.” Despite his quirky mannerisms and his scabrous looks Draper provided a full evening’s education. He started playing tricks on the dorm phone, made some international telephone calls, checked out a few dial-a-joke services and recorded weather forecasts in foreign cities.
He also showed his listeners how to “stack tandems” by bouncing a call from one tandem to another in different cities across America, finishing with a call to a telephone across the hallway. Once the telephonic