Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [36]
The lessons continued after they adjourned to Kips, a Berkeley Pizza Parlor. Draper was impressed by Wozniak’s blue box: “It never drifted and never needed tuning but it sounded a bit tinny.” Draper gave Jobs and Wozniak numbers of other phone phreaks, special telephone numbers, country codes, undersea-cable codes, satellite codes, access codes. He barraged them with details of toll switching trunks, conference bridges, routing indicators, supervisory signals, and traffic service position stations. Draper warned Wozniak and Jobs never to carry a blue box around and to make blue-box calls only from pay phones. Wozniak thought: “It was the most astounding meeting we’d ever had.”
The same evening on their way back to Los Altos (where Wozniak had left his car) Jobs’s red Fiat broke down. For the first time they used their blue box from a pay phone near a freeway ramp and tried to reach Draper who was heading in the same direction. They dialed an operator to get an 800 number and started to get the jitters when she called back to check whether they were still on the line. Jobs tucked the blue box away and was dialing a legal call when a police car pulled up alongside. The policemen ordered them out of the booth and started inspecting the bushes and shrubs. Just before they were ordered against a wall with their legs astride to be patted down, Jobs slipped Wozniak the blue box, which was soon uncovered.
“What’s this?” asked one of the policemen.
“A music synthesizer,” Wozniak replied.
“What’s this orange button for?”
“Oh, that’s for calibration,” Jobs interrupted.
“It’s a computer-controlled synthesizer,” Wozniak elaborated.
“Where’s the computer then?”
“That plugs inside,” Jobs said.
Finally, satisfied that the long-haired pair weren’t carrying any drugs, the policemen gave Jobs and Wozniak a ride back along the freeway. One of the policemen pivoted in his seat, returned the blue box, and said: “Too bad. A guy named Moog beat you to it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jobs said, “he sent us the schematics.”
To cap off the night, Wozniak picked up his Ford Pinto from the Jobs house and was headed back up the Nimitz Freeway toward Berkeley when he dozed off and destroyed the car after ramming it into the crash barriers.
Wozniak and Jobs plumped on suitable names for their new pursuit. The first chose the safe sounding Berkeley Blue while the latter decided to call himself Oaf Tobark. By the end of his first quarter at Berkeley Wozniak was fully occupied with blue boxes. He began to collect magazine articles and newspaper stories, pasted the better clips to the wall, and found the printed matter most illuminating. He subscribed to a newsletter published by TAP, the Technological American Party, and was aware of other underground journals like TEL, the Telephone Electronics Line, and of cells like “Phone Phreaks International” and “Phone Phreaks of America.” But for the most part he and Jobs floated on the periphery of a circle that attracted the sort of people who studied computers at MIT, hung around the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford, and knew about computer files that provided the latest phreaking tricks.
Wozniak and Jobs were much more interested in practical matters and in expanding their collection of gadgets than in lingering around a university. Following instructions printed in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book and the left-wing magazine Ramparts, Wozniak equipped himself with a black box that allowed free incoming calls and a red box that simulated the sound of coins dropping into a pay phone.
But the most lucrative and amusing part of the arms collection was the blue box. Wozniak soon showed its virtues to his friends. He displayed its power to Allen Baum at two phone booths near Homestead High School. Wozniak phoned