Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [37]
The pair employed their own marketing techniques for uncovering customers and boosting sales. They crept along the corridors of male dormitories at Berkeley (convinced that few women would be interested in their little device), knocking on doors and measuring the response to their rehearsed patter. “Is George here?” one of them would ask cagily. “George?” came the surprised response. “Yeah, George. You know the blue-box guy. The guy who does the phone tricks. The guy who has the blue box to make free long-distance phone calls.” Jobs and Wozniak watched the expression of their potential customer. If they were greeted with puzzled, timid looks they apologized for knocking on the wrong door and padded off down the hallway. If their ploy provoked a curious response, the potential customer was invited to attend a blue-box demonstration.
After a few weeks the dormitory sales pitches assumed a pattern. Wozniak hooked a tape recorder to the telephone with some alligator clips and he and Jobs explained the basic principles of the blue box. Then they followed up with a display of its power. Wozniak, in particular, relished being the center of attention. “It was a big show-off thing.” They called the home numbers of friends and relatives of some of their audience in the United States. Then they started phoning overseas and finally they tried to build a global link—starting in Berkeley and bouncing through operators in several countries—and finishing at another nearby Berkeley telephone. On one occasion Jobs used the box to make room reservations for a large party at the Ritz Hotel in London and, unable to suppress his giggles, handed the receiver to Wozniak. Another time Wozniak said that he pretended to be Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and phoned the Vatican asking to be connected to the Pontiff. A Vatican functionary explained that the Pope was still asleep but that somebody would be dispatched to wake him. Another official came on the line and tumbled to the ruse.
The demonstrations provoked curiosity and Jobs and Wozniak made cassette tapes of tones that friends would need to call their favorite long-distance numbers. The evening shows also produced orders. The pair came to an informal agreement about the manufacture of the blue boxes. Jobs arranged a supply of about $40 worth of parts and Wozniak took about four hours to wire a box which was then sold for about $150. To cut down on the time it took to build boxes the pair decided to stop wiring the boxes by hand and to have a printed circuit board made. Instead of spending four hours wiring a box, Wozniak could now finish a box within an hour. He also added another feature that turned one button into an automatic dialer. A small speaker and battery were attached to the printed circuit board, a keypad glued to the lid, and when all was finished, a card bearing a message written in purple felt pen was taped to the bottom. It read “He’s got the whole world in his hand” and it was linked to an informal guarantee. Wozniak promised that if a faulty box was returned and still contained the card he would repair it free of charge.
After about a year Jobs, through a combination of boredom and fear of the possible consequences, bowed out of the business. There were, after all, only so many relatives, friends, weather recordings, automatic clocks, and dial-a-jokes to call. There was also good reason to be anxious: The telephone companies were cracking down hard on the phreaks and employed security agents to snap photographs at phone-phreak conventions, placed houses under surveillance, installed tracing equipment at switching stations, rewarded informants, paid double agents and launched occasional raids. Sinister aspects