Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [38]
Jobs was also suspicious of Captain Crunch. Draper’s frantic tone, his habit of interrupting phone conversations with emergency calls, his hysterical behavior when cigarettes were lit, and his invitations to physical exercise sessions made Jobs wary. “He was spaced out and weird.” Jobs thought that the legend, portrayed in the Esquire article, ran ahead of the facts. Even the bootleg 65-watt FM radio station San Jose Free Radio that Draper broadcast most weekends from the back of a van parked in the hills near the Lick Observatory didn’t compensate for his quirks. Jobs’s judgment was borne out. Though Jobs didn’t know it at the time, General Telephone had placed a trace on Draper’s telephone to tape his outgoing calls. Among the names and telephone numbers eventually handed over to the FBI was that of the Jobs household. In 1972 Draper was convicted of a wire-fraud charge but escaped with a $1,000 fine and five years of probation. The hobby also proved dangerous in another way. Preparing to sell a box one evening in a parking lot outside a Sunnyvale pizza parlor, Jobs suddenly found himself staring at a customer with a gun. “There were eighteen hundred things I could do but every one had some probability that he would shoot me in the stomach.” Jobs handed over the blue box.
For a while Wozniak ran the business by himself. He discovered other tricks, such as how to make free calls from the telephones that hotels and car-rental firms leave at airports. On occasion he also tapped the housemother’s phone at Berkeley and listened in on conversations at the FBI office in San Francisco. For about a year before their interest petered out and the phone company started to refine its switching equipment, Jobs and Wozniak switched roles. The former kept his distance while Wozniak took orders at his parents’ house and casually minded the operation. Nevertheless he split with Jobs the $6,000 or so that he earned from the sale of about two hundred blue boxes: “It was my business and Steve got half of it.”
A couple of Wozniak’s friends distributed the boxes around Berkeley while a high-school student who masqueraded under the name Johnny Bagel helped arrange sales in Beverly Hills. Some of Wozniak’s blue boxes wound up in the hands of international swindler Bernie Cornfeld and rock singer Ike Turner. At times the distributors harassed Wozniak who became bored with the repetitive assembly work. He took to ordering parts from electronics distributors under an assumed name and sometimes flew to Los Angeles to deliver blue boxes, checking his small suitcase as baggage to avoid the airport X-ray detector. On one occasion his attempts at subterfuge ended in confused embarrassment. He booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles under the name Pete Rose, oblivious to the fact that it belonged to one of the best-known major-league baseball players. Wozniak arrived at the airport, told the ticketing agent he was picking up a ticket for Pete Rose, and then discovered that he didn’t have enough cash for the ticket but also didn’t want to pay with a check that carried his real name.
Wozniak had proved himself a master of the hardware terminal, the blue box. It was built from an original design and was capable of competing with the smartest around. He gave further evidence of his prowess by concealing a blue box inside the case of a Hewlett-Packard calculator. His command of software was more questionable. He didn’t devote the time needed to master the telephone system as thoroughly as some of the other phreaks, and though he eluded capture, many of his customers weren’t so lucky. In the informal hierarchy of phreaks, Wozniak fell more into the realm of hacker than phreak.
He didn’t even experiment with placing calls on AUTOVON, a telephone system used for military communications that was a playground for the hardened phreaks.